[ben_w]

> There is a philosophical idea that a person can only ever be sure of their own consciousness; everyone else could be mindless machines and you have no way of knowing

A while back I realised there must be at least two: me, and the first person who talked or wrote about it such that I could encounter the meme.

In principle all the philosophers might be stochastic parrots/P-zombies from that first source, but the first had to be there.

(And to pick my own nit: technically they didn't have to exist, infinite monkeys on a typewriter and/or Boltzmann brain).

[a_cardboard_box]

> A while back I realised there must be at least two: me, and the first person who talked or wrote about it such that I could encounter the meme.

Perhaps you invented the meme, but have since forgotten.

[ben_w]

You're right.

I'll just put that nit in the pile with the other nits… :)

[jimbokun]

So just you and Descartes.

[ben_w]

No way of knowing if Descartes was simply parroting what he heard from another, just as you can't tell I'm not a large language model trained by the human who created this account ;P