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0 pointsfjfaase1y ago0 comments

It is indeed a hard question that one could also apply to humans. There is no way to know if someone else is conscious. It might be obvious for all people, but what about babies or people with advanced stages with dementia or certain types of brain damage? What about people with mental disabilities? (I have experienced some of these in family members.)

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andrepd1y ago

Even for "normal" humans, the point is that consciousness is by definition unobservable from the outside, so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling. It's the p-zombies thought experiment.

ben_w1y ago

> so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling

Indeed, though* all of us should be confident that there is at least a second conscious being besides ourselves, the one who coined the term.

* ignoring A J Ayer for a moment, even though "there is a thought now" would be the only form of consciousness that a current LLM could possibly have if it had any at all

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