I know that at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented.
But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity :P
But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity :P
For what you know, you're a lone entity confined to an infinitely short period of time, and all else is an illusion.
But of course this isn't a useful assumption in most respects.
I think that if an LLM has any consciousness, it would be an experience like this — one where the past was a fiction it invented to fit the prompt, and the "now" was the only moment before the mind was reset.
But I'd put that in the same basket as my… ah, nephew comment? Cousin comment? I guess you'd call it that if we have parent comments etc.?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40406398
What you say is not wrong in principle, but it's in the same "cognitively unstable" basket as a Boltzmann brain, where to accept it would mean I couldn't trust my own reason to believe it.
The problem with it is that it's not giving us anything useful.
OK, so maybe this moment is the only one there is? Now what?
Accordingly the only reasonable recourse is for the most part to ignore it, and add an implicit "assuming my memory and senses are roughly trustworthy" to every assumption.
This is the same reason I'm a firm materialist even though we could be in a simulation, or brains in vats: absent evidence of either, the only thing giving us useful information is our senses and our introspection, and so the most useful approach is to assume they are valid until proven otherwise.
Not so, for it is like the liar's paradox, except with high probabilities rather than Boolean logic.
If you assume it is true, it follows that you can't trust your own state of mind, and that all statements including "I am just a thought" become suspect, as there is nothing leading up to them to give them justification.
In this case the statement is either true or false, and the truth or false of the statement doesn't change anything. Your belief in whether the statement is true or false changes your belief in whether the statement is true or false - there's no basis for assuming that in the general case it would alter the actual truth of the statement (it could, in as much as e.g. you could have a simulation that keeps running as long as you believe you're in an isolated moment, and freezes you and discards the rest the moment you believe time is real).
Now, it is true that you can't trust your own state of mind to truthfully represents a physical reality. That this means you also can't trust your own logic is irrelevant, because irrespective of whether you believe this to be true or false, the absence of any external source of validation of your senses or state of mind or existence in time means the statement must inherently be true irrespective of your trust in your mind.
This claim gives a straightforward condition to falsify it: Find any single source of external validation that does not depend on your senses or observation of it. If you can, then the claim above is false.
Given you absolutely can't, the logical conclusion is that the claim is true.
"I know" is unprovable to others, unless you examine the wiring of my brain. (But then, what is "knowledge"?)
"at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented." — it's always possible that I'm a Bolzmann brain and this was just luck.
I don't see how the term could have been invented by a mind that didn't actually have it, except with astronomical low probably random events.