[iosystem]

How do we know consciousness is real, and we're not just the same as robots or a tv series? Couldn't every moment throughout the universe have been encoded in every atom before the Big Bang?

[mcronce]

That's certainly possible, but it doesn't make your experiences any less real

[dilyevsky]

It certainly does because in this case there is no “you”

[ben_w]

"There is a thought now" has real experiences without anything we would normally want to call a real experiencer.

[mcronce]

And yet here you are reading that comment, writing this one... And those experiences are real.

[dilyevsky]

Says who?

[mcronce]

You, me, and anybody else reading the comments.

If you want to disagree on the metaphysics or whatever go ahead, but this is already proving to be a huge waste of time and I'm not particularly interested.

[msarchet]

You is a very loaded word here.

[Ycombigatorz]

How do you know that when you touch a chair that that sensation is real?

[msarchet]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia[1] - is what you are now describing mixed with a little bit of Maxwell's Demon[2] - something is intercepting between you and a true experience.

Real, in the way I believe you are trying to express, is a complicated topic.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

[ben_w]

I'm nit picking here, but I think you meant Cartesian demon?