[qgin]

I know I’m conscious. I only extend the assumption to you that you’re conscious because I’m hoping you will extend the same to me. But I have no way of knowing that you are. And you (if you really are conscious) have no way of knowing that I am.

[RangerScience]

This is a good starting point, but it doesn't have to be the _conclusion_ to this line of thinking.

Philosophically: You can being building criteria for consciousness; the things you look at in yourself that tell you are, and then begin looking for that (or symptoms of that) in other people.

Anecdotally: you can totes spot "unconscious" people. You can even watch people gain consciousness, if you watch 'em in the right circumstances. You can even watch yourself regain consciousness (for me it's usually a sensation of "what was I even doing for the past day/week/month).

All of this gets at least as weird and fuzzy as trying to define "consciousness" in the first place.

[dinfinity]

> You can being building criteria for consciousness; the things you look at in yourself that tell you are, and then begin looking for that (or symptoms of that) in other people.

This is only true for the outward behavior we define as consciousness. The experiential part of it (qualia and such) can not be described in objective terms (try describing 'redness' by itself). That is the hard problem of consciousness.

What you can do in that realm is experiment with n=1 using optical illusions, psychedelics and dissociatives (in ascending order of how weird you want things to get).

[libraryofbabel]

> you can totes spot "unconscious" people

Don’t be too sure about that! https://xkcd.com/610/

That said, (based on my own experience anyway) I think you’re right that there are times of life when we are more conscious and less so. It’s a spectrum, not a binary thing.

Finally, there’s Chalmers’s idea of “philosophical zombies,” which would appear conscious according to all the criteria you give, but have no actual interior consciousness at all. (Opinions differ on whether this is a meaningful concept.)

[ahazred8ta]

This has been mocked by the idea of a "zombike", an object physically exactly identical to a bicycle in every way down to the molecules, but if you turn the pedals then the wheels don't go round.

[recursivedoubts]

really, if you think about it, you have no way of knowing if I'm not just a figment of your imagination.

or, maybe, you are just a figment of mine.

if you think about it.

[wongarsu]

All you truly know is that right now you are having a thought. Which means some entity most exist that has that thought. Everything else could be a product of your imagination, or something the beings that put you into the matrix want you to think

Or as another possibly-previously-existing possibly-conscious entity put it succinctly: I think, therefore I am

[exe34]

You have done some nice footwork by shifting the conversation to

> you are having a thought

But you're still begging the question:

> Which means some entity most exist that has that thought

[DangitBobby]

I'm not seeing the problem.

[RangerScience]

nah. there's a lag time in my imagination filling in deeper details (roughly: the more time I spend imagining an apple, the more detailed it gets) that isn't present when interrogating reality. Reality is immediately as detailed as I can examine.

[wongarsu]

That just shows they are dedicating more processing power to "reality" than to "imagination"

[otikik]

And you can’t even be sure about yourself, either. All your memories could be implanted, for all you know. This could be your first conscious thought, this instant. Welcome to the Universe.

[recursivedoubts]

man

[otikik]

:)

[sunrunner]

> I know I’m conscious

How? Or is this more of a case of "To the extent of my ability to reason about my own state of being, I'm conscious. But I can't reason about external entities."

[dingnuts]

cogito ergo sum

[FreakLegion]

There's a pretty hefty literature tackling that claim, ranging from stuffy academic treatises to Nietzsche:

There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are "immediate certainties"; for example, "I think," or as the superstition of Schopenhauer put it, "I will"; as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as "the thing in itself," without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object. But that "immediate certainty," as well as "absolute knowledge" and the "thing in itself," involve a contradictio in adjecto," I shall repeat a hundred times; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!

Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, "I think," I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an "ego," and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I know what thinking is, For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps "willing" or "feeling"? In short, the assertion "I think" assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further "knowledge," it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.

In place of the "immediate certainty" in which the people may believe in the case at hand, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, truly searching questions of the intellect; to wit: "From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thought?" Whoever ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain"--will encounter a smile and two question marks from a philosopher nowadays. "Sir," the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, "it is improbable that you are not mistaken; but why insist on the truth?"

--

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." It thinks; but that this "it" is precisely the famous old "ego" is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "it thinks"--even the "it" contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: "Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently--"

--Beyond Good and Evil

[exe34]

> I know I’m conscious

You believe so.