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Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

To me it seems that the hard problem of consciousness can be stated a lot simpler, like so:

How can we tell if another person is conscious or not?

As far as I see, this is not possible and will never be possible. Hence the "hard problem".

We don't know if dark matter exists, but we can still observe it by its gravitational effect on large astronomical objects. We can't be sure it's dark matter, but it's "likely" dark matter.

I believe we can do something similar with consciousness. We can make measurements or observations of a person and conclude they are "likely" consciousness.

Maybe we can't ever be 100% certain whether a person is conscious or not. But nothing in science is 100% certain. No matter how much evidence we have, it would only take a single counterexample to disprove a well established scientific theory.

> But nothing in science is 100% certain.

Scientists are arguably "in" (a part of) science, and they are often extremely certain (as a consequence of being culturalized humans).

Mechanical telepathy may be possible, and for me could possibly answer this question. You and they put on a device whereby you tap into their conscious experience, see through their eyes, hear the voices in their head...

Even then, you're still only experiencing your own, single, unitary stream of experience, you've just replaced or superimposed parts of it with signals from another nervous system. But even if you can somehow replace/superimpose the signals coming through their optic nerve, for example, into your own experience, that still doesn't answer the question of whether or not they have their own stream of experience to begin with. That is simply unknowable, outside of the reasonable assumptions we all make to avoid solipsism (but they are still assumptions at the end of the day).

That seems unlikely, as neural networks don't all develop exactly the same. There is some natural variance which brain regions perform which function. E.g. Broca's area (very important for speech) only 'usually' lies on your left hemisphere. We know from experiments that stimulating certain areas of the brain produces certain (predictable) feelings, but to stimulate the brain in such a way to transfer an exact thought or a specific vision would seem impossible without a very detailed scan of the source and destination brain, and a complex remapping in between. And some experiences may not be transferable if the target doesn't hawe the required circuitry.

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