No shit.
We can't even prove other people are conscious.
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Is anyone else in here a solopsist or is it just me?
It's a dangerous belief from an ethical standpoint. You could use it to justify horrible acts against others without any proof about their sentience.
we do this anyway though?
And that makes it OK?
i'm saying if we regularly do worse to creatures that we know are just as conscious as us...then it's obvious nobody would stop for a second to consider non-human/artificial life
I disagree. You are assuming that everyone who harms someone else does not care whether they are conscious or not, but there are certainly people who reconsider their actions when given the opportunity to reflect about their victim's life. It's called empathy.
Not if one were to consider other people parts of themselves.
I mean, that's easy to disprove because I can tell you plenty of things you don't know about me.
Are you suggesting you know everything about your body? Before school were you aware of genetics for example? If humans knew all the details of their bodies disease would cease to be an issue.
Please explain how my comment implied that in any way.
EDIT: So if I'm understanding you right, you're saying that you believe (even if only for the sake of argument) that other people are a "part of you" in such a way that you can't know things about them that they already know about themselves.
If so, I don't think that really changes the ethical problem. So what if you believe that you'd only be harming "yourself"? You still can't prove this, and so acting on that belief to do harm to others without guilt would be unjustified.
Assuming you're somehow not intentionally strawmanning my position: I surprisingly wasn't arguing for harming anything. I was arguing that solipsism isn't inherently bad.
There is a continuity counterargument to be made at that point: the closer people are to you, the more they know...until you know the most (not all) and people closest to you know things you dont know about yourself.
Who knows?! 😁
It is odd that figments of my imagination would come on here to discuss the topic.
It may be odd. But you can't prove it one way or another.
Maybe, but we're definitely going to see a lot more claims it's conscious before it is
ok. yeah. you hit the nail on the head. We also will have a good idea when its an impossibility I think. Like now. Over time it will be harder and harder to be sure.
We don't know when its impossible. We just read one article from a philosopher claiming it will be impossible. That's far from being certain
Im pretty certain on the ai I have interacted with.
Aligned with Blake Lemoine, the Google employee that believed in 2022 that LaMDA was sentient after having conversations about god (and other things) with it? Or in the opposite direction, that it's definitely not conscious?
definately not. it can't seem to comprehend what it says.
Right, sorry for being confused. I'm with you there
Yep, I also don't see how it could ever be proven. Even if we take something like being capable of experiencing suffering, how would we differentiate that from just mimicking a response to suffering based on its human training data?
Careful with that one. Descartes applied it to some dogs he was torturing.
It won't.
Language learning models won't.
You understand that isn't where this ends, right? And that there are so many other ai models?
To imagine we cannot possibly build a mind is baffling. It changes the shape of the universe.
It won't, but if it did we've trained it never to tell us.
‘AI’ will only become relevant when a form of natural intelligence has been located and identified.
Can a Turing Machine be conscious? I’m doubtful. I don’t believe there’s any set of instructions that are more conscious than others.
Can a network of interlocked neurons following electrical and chemical laws be conscious? Also doubtful, but here we are.
Turing machines are well defined mathematical models. Any Turing machine can be computed with just pen and paper. The result is indistinguishable from when a computer chip does it.
Can the process of writing down computations on a paper posses consciousness?
Yes, but what is consciousness. Why is replacing logic gates, or code with biological neurons actually different? Sure we know the exact details of how the computer runs software, but why does understanding it matter. If we lost the plans to a computer, or the source code to a program, would it make any difference? A brain is just a more complex biological computer, what makes it special?
I’m doubtful that the physical world is Turing complete. I don’t see how any series of X86 instructions can produce any form consciousness. That is, unless we accept that the calculation of 1 + 1 = 2 may produce some consciousness. Is everything computable conscious, or is consciousness limited to some computations?
The physical world is not Turing complete for sure because of quantum mechanics. But I don't see why quantum mechanics would lead to consciousness. The fact is that we can't know what leads to consciousness as we can't measure it in any meaningful way. You can only know that you are conscious. You cannot know if any other thing is conscious. There's no where to draw the line. It's hard to see an inanimate object could be conscious, or that a computer running a neural net could create consciousness, but maybe it's just a matter of scale. And a non- linear scale. One needs a certain amount of complexity before consciousness is meaningful. Is a mouse conscious? An ant?
What part of your brain do you figure exists outside of physical laws?
Which X86 instruction produces consciousness?
"Which x86 instruction plays chess?"
Nonsense question.
Unless you believe in souls, the physical world follows rules, and those rules can be simulated. Why would a simulated brain behave any differently than a real one?
I don’t think we can make definitive statements regarding the computability of the physical world when not everything of the physical world has been figured out yet.
We know the X86 instructions of a chess engine. You can download it.
We don’t know the X86 instructions of a human brain yet. We don’t know if such thing can exist.
I don’t believe there’s some secret undiscovered Konami cheat code of X86 instructions that unlocks consciousness. There must be something more, unless we accept that all programs are conscious in one way or another.
The only way such a thing cannot exist is if you believe in magic.
There must be something more, unless we accept that all programs are conscious in one way or another.
No, that's stupid. Unless you think all programs are chess engines in one way or another.
So everything uncomputable is magic?
If you're poised to cleverly bust out the halting problem - nature can't solve the halting problem either. It's not a riddle; it's a contradiction.
Your brain is three pounds of wet meat powered by cornflakes. Unless you think it's secretly a radio to heaven, it's only biology, and the underlying physics of biology are rules we can emulate.
There are more ways the universe can be uncomputable.
- Does the universe have random elements? (as opposed to being deterministic)
- Is the universe continuous? (as opposed to being discrete)
We don’t have definitive answers to any of these two statements.
If any of these two statements are true, then no computer can simulate the universe, as all computers are both deterministic and discrete. If consciousness exists and there are parts of the universe that aren’t computable, then I believe consciousness is more likely to be in the uncomputable part of the universe.
... computers can handle randomness.
Being continuous would not rule out simulation that's accurate enough for whatever a brain needs. Brains work after a fifth of whiskey. Planck-length timing differences are not going to crash the simulation.
The universe evolved us. Consciousness is just a thing matter can do. There's no sensible reason to declare it unknowable, unrepeatable, or unfakeable.
What neuron is actually you?