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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Der_Einzige 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Radical skepticism of one's own consciousness is a perfectly fine take. Stop being baited by desecration propaganda about the cogito. You don't know if what actually appears to you as "thought" is actually "thinking". The appearance of thinking is not necessarily actually thinking (Chain of thought in models should make this very explicitly obvious to people).

Take the radical skepticism pill and embrace epistemological monism - the idea that the only real truth is that all things are interpretations.

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bluefirebrand 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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 20 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

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threethirtytwo 19 hours 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.

	▲	bena 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm a little unclear as to what the disagreement is. I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely. Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of really knowing the experience of someone or something else. Or if what we perceive is what's actually happening. Because, as you note, the brain can be manipulated to act in ways counter to the manner it had been acting previously. We can induce sound and vision. If we were better at it and could keep the brain alive, we could full on do a brain in a vat. And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine. Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront. And even with all of the more absurd conjectures, basically any form of "Last Thursdayism" of which simulation theory falls under, it's quicker to just assume that it's not true and treat the world we perceive as real with real rules that can be discovered through observation, testing, and experimentation. Because that's the only way we've been able to make any progress.