[jessicas_rabbit]

I’m here playing devil’s advocate - this test doesn’t work. Here are some related thought experiments.

Suppose a soul is an immaterial source of intelligence, but it controls the body via machine-like material hardware such as neurons.

Or an alternative, suppose there is a soul inside your body “watching” the sensory activations within your brain like a movie. The brain and body create the movie & have some intelligence, but other important properties of the consciousness are bound to this observer entity.

In both these cases, the test just shows that if you damage the hardware, you can no longer observe intelligence because you’ve broken the end-to-end flow of the machine.

[burnished]

Its fine if you are playing or supposing in seriousness but with good humor, it doesn't really change how anyone else should interact with you :)

But yes, supposing that then you would expect to only see damages that correspond such as different forms of paralysis or other purely mechanical damages, not things that change the interior perspective.

Otherwise you start postulating the existence of a thing whose sole justification is your desire for the existence of that thing, which is natural when you start questioning beliefs and kick out all the supports without meaning to.

I think this is what Bertrand Russel's teapot was meant to ellucidate.