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Comment by qarl2 | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.

Agreed. But that also means I have no empirical evidence that YOU are conscious either.

Any argument that would lead us to discard 99.9999999% of the phenomenon under debate, no matter how reasonable, is certainly not useful.

That's why I hold with the philosophical stance of "consciousness is the thing that makes humans talk about consciousness."

Might as well ask, "what if reality doesn't exist?" The point of thought is to analyze reality. If your thinking leads you to discard the subject of the matter, well, feel free to do that but I don't see why anyone else should take it seriously.

YES - I agree entirely. But how are we going to escape solipsism?

These questions need a practical solution, not a perfect one. That's the problem. We need to stop chasing the perfect one.

I agreed with you earlier that there’s no empirical test against solipsism.

So the escape is just to accept not all beliefs worth holding are empirically verifiable. I deny solipsism because I believe there is a universe and things in it obey some kind regular patterns. You have a brain similar to mine, and similar to other animals. I believe consciousness has something to do with the brain, so I believe you are conscious.

Sure. And that's what I mean by a practical solution.

But it seems suspect to accept a practical solution in one area (humans) and deny it in an almost identical (machines with neuron based brains) area. No?

If by neuron based you mean the biological neuron, then I agree. If you mean an arbitrary substrate which models every aspect of a neuron we are aware of, I’m not sure. I think it would be more surprising if it’s impossible to do processing without creating consciousness with some substrate than one in which e.g. calculating the state of a computer using pencil and paper actually produces consciousness. I personally believe whatever consciousness is, it’s a causal physical (yet to be understood) process, and the measurements of neuron states are just some residue of it, not the thing itself.

The question is: What makes you trust your own perception that doesn’t make you trust others’ reports? Objectively speaking, how could there possibly something that convinces you of your own perception while nothing can convince you of another’s reporting? Maybe we shouldn’t trust our “qualia” (or perception of qualia — or perception of perception of qualia …) to constitute reliable information.

People seriously undervalue the importance of "usefulness" in ontology. If I assume that the thing that others report is the same thing that I perceive, which given that they have a very similar slab of meat inside their skull as I do seems very plausible, then I can use my self-perception to learn about the interiority of 8 billion other people. I can even compare it to their reports to learn things about myself that would be hard to tell by observation!

If I assume that my perception, for some reason, is only informative about myself, then I'm not even learning something about brains! I have to assume that I'm accessing an information stream that is only tangentially related to any sort of shared reality, and has certainly no bearing on other parts of it even if I assume it has bearing on "my" part of it for which, strictly speaking, I also don't have direct evidence.

If there are two possible universes, one universe "A" where thought is valuable and useful, and one universe "B" where thought is solipsistic and extremely isolated, and also there is not just no evidence about which you are in but also philosophical arguments that there cannot ever be evidence about which you are in, I don't see why you should give universe "B" any serious thought. What are you standing to gain?

Then we agree. You don’t have empirical evidence that I am conscious.

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