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I cannot prove that they are, and I cannot prove they are not. I'm not convinced that the burden of proof lies on either side. To make a statement like that in the opening lines as if its obvious seems genuinely presumptous.

Separately, I think 'conscious' is not a well defined / universally agreed upon term.

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> To make a statement like that in the opening lines as if its obvious seems genuinely presumptous.

Then you must not be familiar with Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy. The TL;DR is this: “Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.”

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