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Comment by threethirtytwo | Hacker News Reader

>And I can't prove it either way.

Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this.

While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical changes to the brain visibly influencing personality and behavior meets a reasonable criterion without getting too pedantic.

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I'm a little unclear as to what the disagreement is.

I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely.

Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of really knowing the experience of someone or something else. Or if what we perceive is what's actually happening. Because, as you note, the brain can be manipulated to act in ways counter to the manner it had been acting previously. We can induce sound and vision. If we were better at it and could keep the brain alive, we could full on do a brain in a vat.

And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.

Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.

And even with all of the more absurd conjectures, basically any form of "Last Thursdayism" of which simulation theory falls under, it's quicker to just assume that it's not true and treat the world we perceive as real with real rules that can be discovered through observation, testing, and experimentation. Because that's the only way we've been able to make any progress.

See it’s too pedantic now.

My statement is not that a type of proof is impossible. All proof is impossible. This is a fact of science. Proof is only possible in mathematics which is a made up game of axioms and theorems. Proof in reality is impossible.

But humans go about believing in many things without proof. We believe in physics without proof because it’s relatively consistent though unproven. And I am saying that things like brain damage, brain surgery and electrodes and the physical changes those things do to the personality is ALSO relatively consistent.

Consistent enough that we can know that the souls doesn’t exist that the personality the ego is a manifestation of the physical brain. Proof is not needed because we can’t prove anything anyway and the criterion is met in this aspect because it is the baseline of how we believe all things without proof.

For example:

We know that conscious experience and personality are manifestations of the physical brain rather than a non-physical soul because targeted changes to brain tissue directly alter a person's core identity, memories, and behaviors. The most famous historical example of this is Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker who survived an iron rod blasting through his frontal lobe; while his body healed, his polite, reliable personality vanished, replacing him with an impulsive and erratic stranger. Similarly, modern medical cases of patients suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease or traumatic brain injuries show how the physical erosion of brain matter systematically erases lifelong memories, moral reasoning, and the emotional bonds that define a person's character. Furthermore, patients who undergo "split-brain" surgery to treat epilepsy—where the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres is severed—effectively develop two separate streams of consciousness inside one head, with one half of the brain holding beliefs or desires that the other half is completely unaware of. If a unified, spiritual soul were the true source of our character, choices, and consciousness, physical damage, tissue erosion, or surgical separation would leave those abstract traits unharmed. Instead, because changing the physical structure and chemistry of the brain completely rewrites or splits who a person is, modern neuroscience concludes that the mind is entirely a product of the physical brain.

> And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.

> Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.

we can't prove, in this mathematics sense, that other people are conscious just as we can't prove that the sun will rise again tomorrow, or that my food will nourish me instead of killing me, or that everything is still there when you're not looking. for questions of this type we normally content ourselves with empirical evidence instead. and the empirical evidence for the consciousness of other humans (and, taking it further, other animals) for me would be the facts (1) that i am conscious, and that (2) i am a human like other humans: same anatomy, same behaviors, same story. indeed, empirically, it'd be absurd to think that i'd be so profoundly different from other humans in this particular aspect.

i guess what i'm saying is for me the real existential horror is the problem of induction.

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