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Charon77 15 hours ago

If I stab at your teddy bear will you feel that it is hurt?

Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either

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blatherard 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No of course not, because its a teddy bear!

At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.

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zdragnar 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is describing empathy at best and delusion to be uncharitable.

To look at it another way: this form of social construction answers the question of "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" with an emphatic "no". It is a sillier version of solipsism.

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threethirtytwo 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious. If you use that axiom then given genetics you know that other humans are rough copies of you so if you are conscious so are your copies because consciousness was copied.

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bluefirebrand 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious

I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true

I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof

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bena 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think you're being pedantic. The person you're replying to seems like he wants to cut off the solipsistic argument; the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, everything else is debateable.

So while I know I am conscious, I do not know that everything I experience aren't just impulses fed to my brain by some external force. And I can't prove it either way. I have no way to test whether or not I'm a brain in a jar because the very thing I would use to evaluate the evidence is the thing that is potentially being manipulated.

However, slapping a solipsist sees them abandoning their philosophy rather quickly.

But I agree with you. We can't prove it, but "other people are as real and conscious as I" is a reasonable assumption to make

	▲	threethirtytwo 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>And I can't prove it either way. Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this. While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical changes to the brain visibly influencing personality and behavior meets a reasonable criterion without getting too pedantic.