Why You Know At Least One Other Being Is Conscious

[Bork]

Well we have 3 options:

A) there are other conscious beings

B) there are no other conscious beings

C) (A) or (B) is true but we ought to believe neither

It seems neither (A) nor (B) can be deductively reasoned from indubitible facts. So, we are left deciding if either option fits better with our experience.. If neither does or if one is only slightly better then we should choose (C). I know some on this board choose (C) for just about everything because they think the threshold for knowledge is 100% certainty. For the sake of doing some real philosophy lets conditionally assume that knowledge is easier to come by. Though what level of certainty is necessary is up for debate.

I think option (A) is a more elegant fit (Than B) with our experience of many many apparently conscious things. Its of course possible that we have a vastly powerful subconscious type activity going on which creates all of those entities i.e. we produce all of the merely apparent conscious beings. One wonders though if thats the case would the part of our mind completely hidden from us which is so powerful and strange really be part of us? I think it might be more accurately considered a seperate consciousness.

Now consider what most people believe, that at least some of apparent conscious beings are genuine. There are billions of them, only one needs to be genuine. This explanation doesnt require that we have a superpowerful hidden portion of our minds that produces vast illusions. I would say its a better explanations, and it is superior enough that I know it to be true with a high degree of certainty.

There are of course pragmatic reasons for believing (A) i.e. we will probably have better lives.. Of course this is irrelevant to the epistemological question of whether (A) is true (or we know it to be true), but it is still a good reason to believe it in my opinion.

Another thought I just had is that (B) is in the form of a universal negative. Typically in order to justifiedly believe something in that form you better have a damn good reason. Like believing there are no married bachelors in the universe.

In this case I dont think anybody has any decent evidence which entails or even suggests that they are the only conscious thing in the universe. Even if all of our apparent other consciousnesses are mere illusions there still need only be one other conscious thing out there.. Perhaps in a parallel universe. So I think solepsism is a silly view. Whereas its main competitor that there is one other conscious thing has a condition that is easier to satisfy and we even have billions of instances of apparent evidence that it is true.

[guesswest]

This is just the problem of other minds, and as far as I can see there's no deductive route to a solution. All we can observe in other people is behaviour, not sentience. We can extrapolate consciousness from those behavioural patterns by comparing the actions of others to ones we make with certain corellating states of mind, but we can't 'know' that those behaviours corellate to particular states of mind, or any mind at all, because we don't have direct access to those thoughts in the same way we do our own thoughts. So establishing the consciousness of external beings will always be an inductive process. The weight of indication is very strong, and we shouldn't feel uncomfortable with induction since that is the same scientific process we base much of our understanding of the world on. But if it's a 'proof' you're looking for I can't see how it's possible to attain one.

[Shooby]

It might be a good idea to define what "consciousness" you are talking about.
Steve

[soon2bepro]

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It might be a good idea to define what "consciousness" you are talking about.
Steve

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pwned

[Bork]

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It might be a good idea to define what "consciousness" you are talking about.
Steve

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pwned

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not necessary

[guesswest]

Yes, not necessary. Unless you're going to define consciousness as something ridiculous like 'a banana'. All we can observe in other people is behaviour, so there is no deductive route to proving other minds exist, or if they do, to finding anything out about those minds.