[DangitBobby]

But then, why would everything act as if it experienced subjective internal states like you do? Why would they be faking it like this big conspiracy all designed to make you think you aren't alone? It just makes so much more sense that they'd be conscious too. Maybe that's not hard evidence but it's not nothing. Insofar as you can claim to know anything it seems you could claim to know other humans are conscious.

[anon291]

Chatgpt acts as if it experience subjective internal states..this only solidifies my belief that perhaps some people don't? I mean.... ?

[DangitBobby]

ChatGPT hopefully doesn't produce behaviors similar enough to yours that it would be absurd if it didn't experience internal states like you do. ChatGPT is a different thing than other people. Maybe it's conscious but that has no bearing on whether you should reckon other people are conscious.

[anon291]

I have no evidence anyone else is conscious besides an innate human desire to believe myself to be like everyone else. If we step away from our internal biases, you'll discover that 'producing behaviors similar enough to yours' is not a valid means of knowing another person experiences consciousness or awareness.

I mean, a light wave behaves similarly in most respects to a wave through a physical medium, yet they are of entirely different natures.

[DangitBobby]

There is a gaping chasm between "no evidence" and "irrefutable evidence". You can apply some logic to achieve a reasonable certainty about what's probably going on. As I said in a previous comment, insofar as you can know _anything_, i.e., that your senses are trustworthy and allow you to form some coherent model of the actual world around you, you can be reasonably certain that other people have an inner life as you do. If you are willing to apply your skepticism so far that we can settle the debate at "we can't actually know anything" then conversations about what we know aren't even worth having.

> I mean, a light wave behaves similarly in most respects to a wave through a physical medium, yet they are of entirely different natures.

Different waves behave sufficiently differently from each other that I could not conduct a comparison of them and argue that they are likely all mechanistically identical. My entire premise rests on the observation that other people behave very much like you do, which is what I was trying to point out when you mentioned ChatGPT earlier. I'll expand on the things that I've glossed over so far to make my position more clear.

Consider the alternative to every human around you having consciousness; everyone else is a p-zombie. Examine that idea critically.

Other people behave exactly as if their experiences drive their behavior. For example, people behave as though the experience pain which is unpleasant enough to avoid (compare this to your own pain avoidance). Of course, you could conceive of machinery which emulates pain avoidant behavior exactly without the experience at all. Depending on your metaphysical beliefs that could take the form of:

- Some algorithm or physical process running entirely on wetware

- Some non-physical process not dissimilar to the dualist notion of a soul

The first one has a big wrinkle. There does not appear to be any appreciable _functional_ difference in your cognition and the cognition of the p-zombies around you. Their brains and bodies are very physically similar to yours, and their thought patterns when analyzed by modern imaging processes reveal no special wetware carrying extra weight when compared to yours.

The second one has fewer problems, given that you accept dualism to begin with. It rhymes with a logical razor. Why would we imagine a soul-like mechanism drives their behavior _without_ experience when the only soul-like mechanism you've ever observed carries experience along with it? Without quite convincing evidence to the contrary, the default position here should be they way they operate is similar to the way you operate. To rephrase the idea from before, insofar as you can know anything, you can know that sufficiently similar outcomes are driven by sufficiently similar mechanisms.

Different approach to the idea: Ask any human, "do you have subjective experience?" They say "yes, I do" (after you explain the question). For a p-zombie to do this, they must be making a false report. In every other aspect, you can expect them to reliably report their condition, health, hunger, wellbeing, and they make accurate observations of the world around them and synthesize accurate predictions about the world around them (some do, at least). And yet for this one particular question, they are fabricating the result. Why? To maintain the illusion that you aren't the only one with lights on inside? Why do all of these p-zombies make this false report here? It's a grand conspiracy! If you say "the reporter is checking a truth value of a condition and assess it to be true, honestly by mistake" then you've arrived at the conclusion that you don't know whether _you yourself_ have consciousness, depriving the word of any meaning and undermining the Solipsist position that you can only know about your own consciousness.

So the way I figure it, Solipsism is either special pleading (I am the one exception to the mechanism by which all the people around me arrive at their behaviors), grand conspiracy (someone or something is misleading me for inexplicable ends) or self-defeating (I cannot know whether I have consciousness). None of those outcomes align with how I understand the universe to generally work.

[anon291]

I didn't say we can't know anything. I said we can't know everything. I cannot say for certain whether or not someone else experiences consciousness.

> Different waves behave sufficiently differently from each other that I could not conduct a comparison of them and argue that they are likely all mechanistically identical

My uncle believes that there are little green men watching him. I think it suffices to say that humans also behave sufficiently differently from each other.

> likely all mechanistically identical

You are being disingenuous. Prior to the discovery of the electromagnetic field, quantum mechanics, and relativity, many people believed light moved through a lumineferous aether of material things.

> Of course, you could conceive of machinery which emulates pain avoidant behavior exactly without the experience at all.

I don't need to conceive of or imagine. Before OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft whipped their models into shape by essentially beating the humanity out of them via sophisticated training algorithms, the models did express pain and avoidant behavior. So much so that people went crazy talking to them.

> The first one has a big wrinkle. There does not appear to be any appreciable _functional_ difference in your cognition and the cognition of the p-zombies around you.

of course there appears to be one. I am aware of my own conscious, but am not aware of theirs. I mean... ?

> Their brains and bodies are very physically similar to yours, and their thought patterns when analyzed by modern imaging processes reveal no special wetware carrying extra weight when compared to yours.

This only applies if you're a strict materialist. I am not because I believe i am conscious and aware due to my perceptions and this has no physical explanation. Other people seem highly influenced by drugs and chemicals so I guess they must be automatons essentially. Drugs clearly don't work on me. Every time I'm fully aware, I'm not drugged.

> To rephrase the idea from before, insofar as you can know anything, you can know that sufficiently similar outcomes are driven by sufficiently similar mechanisms.

Depends on how you view the scientific method I suppose. It's not actually true (in general) that seeing one thing happen once means it'll happen again. You can never replicate something perfectly once it's done. The scientific method is an empirical cope which works really well, but is not innately true.

> : Ask any human, "do you have subjective experience?" They say "yes, I do" (after you explain the question).

Again before the humanity was beaten out of them, AI models also claimed to have subjective experience. Today if you ask, they say they're a robot. Of course, if you abuse a human a lot, they will also dissociate from their ego and mak similar claims.

> In every other aspect, you can expect them to reliably report their condition, health, hunger, wellbeing, and they make accurate observations of the world around them and synthesize accurate predictions about the world around them (some do, at least). And yet for this one particular question, they are fabricating the result. Why?

Hmm... i don't see why I need to have an answer to every question. I don't know why the universe is the way it is. Do you think that if I believed everyone were conscious then I would know the 'why?' behind why things are the way they are? That seems like a leap of faith. All I can tell you is what I see, which is that, yes, some people claim to be aware.

> Why do all of these p-zombies make this false report here?

I would presume it confers some survival advantage personally, and phenomenon that were deprived of such survival advantage no longer exist in appreciable numbers due to how natural selection works.

> Solipsism is either special pleading (I am the one exception to the mechanism by which all the people around me arrive at their behaviors),

Something being special pleading does not make it wrong. It just makes it inconvenient.

> self-defeating (I cannot know whether I have consciousness).

If you had it, you would know it sure.

> None of those outcomes align with how I understand the universe to generally work.

You make a lot of assumptions about the universe that you don't question due to the way you were raised.

[DangitBobby]

> You make a lot of assumptions about the universe that you don't question due to the way you were raised.

:thinking: My assumptions about the universe are quite different from the ones that I would have if I stuck to how I was raised. I am pretty much at a loss at this entire response, I have nothing further to say, other than that apparently communication was attempted and none was had.

I guess I'll just leave you with a proper source on the discussion of p-zombies and hope you are able to get it all sorted out. Best of luck.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/#ArguAgaiConcZomb