[ericmay]

Better yet, consciousness as you’re describing it here is most likely an illusory artifact and evolutionary adaptation, particularly useful for survival and group cooperation. I wouldn’t be so quick to assume about the OP.

With that being said I think it’s fair to suggest we can’t prove that others are conscious but we can do a lot more here with science than we can with the alleged afterlife.

[bumby]

I think that’s why it’s generally broken down into the “easy” and “hard” problems of consciousness. Easy in the sense that we can use our existing scientific toolset; hard as in we cannot.

[ericmay]

Sure but as it relates to the after-life there's not even a "hard" problem to speak of because there is nothing we can assert except that maybe it is the same experience as the one before birth.

We can't effectively use the tools of science here (at least yet), whereas with consciousness and conscious experience we can at least grapple around the edges.

[bumby]

How can we grapple with the edges of the hard problem, except at a philosophical level? To me, that sounds very much like the afterlife debate. I think it just feels different because we each have an innate “feeling” of subjective experience that’s not easy to dismiss.