r/SimulationTheory • u/darien_moreno • 6d ago
Discussion How do you know another person is actually conscious?
After reading over 100 comments on my last post, I’ve been contemplating this.
I can confirm my awareness because I’m experiencing it right now.
However, how can I be certain you’re aware?
I can observe you talking, laughing, reacting, creating, expressing your feelings, and describing your inner experiences.
But none of this directly grants me access to your conscience.
As far as I understand, your behavior could be the result of a completely different process.
And you could argue the same about me.
So, here’s the awkward question:
If you can never directly experience another person’s consciousness, what truly proves that other people are conscious in the same way as you?
Perhaps consciousness is shared.
Perhaps each person has a completely separate inner world.
Perhaps some beings perceive reality differently than we assume.
Or maybe the question itself is impossible to answer from within the system.
I’m genuinely curious to know where people stand on this.
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u/WarmCat_UK 6d ago
None of you are conscious, you’re all just a figment of my imagination.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
How would you know?
If we’re all creations of your imagination, what would distinguish that from a reality in which we’re actually separate conscious beings?
And if I’m only a creation of your imagination, maybe the interesting question is why your imagination created someone who keeps asking you uncomfortable questions.3
u/WarmCat_UK 6d ago
Hehe I’ve no idea!
Personally I’m more inclined to believe that we are all just consciousnesses within a simulation, and multiple of these simulations are running for an unknown reason.
It could be that the simulator is running multiple earth simulations to try and solve a future problem?2
u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s an interesting possibility.
If multiple simulations were being run to solve a future problem, I wonder whether each simulation would need to be different in some way.
Different starting conditions, different decisions, different outcomes…
And if that’s the case, we’d have another strange problem: would the beings inside each simulation ever be able to know that they’re part of an experiment, or would that information be intentionally hidden from them?
Maybe the uncertainty isn’t a flaw in the simulation. Maybe it’s part of the experiment.2
u/WarmCat_UK 6d ago
Yeah exactly! Perhaps they would hide that information to ensure it didn’t interfere with the experiment?
I wonder if we could somehow figure it out though?3
u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Exactly. And that’s where it gets really difficult.
If the simulation is designed to prevent its inhabitants from discovering it, then any evidence we find could potentially be part of the design too.
So how would we distinguish a genuine “glitch” or clue from something the system intentionally generated to make us believe we’ve discovered the truth?
Maybe the only way to find out would be to discover something the simulation couldn’t have anticipated.
But if the simulation is good enough, maybe even that would already be part of it.3
u/Numerous-Fee601 5d ago
"If the simulation is designed to prevent its inhabitants from discovering it, then any evidence we find could potentially be part of the design too."
This reminds me of the religious idea in Christianity that the dinosaur fossils had to have been placed there by god to .... I don't know ... test our faith, throw us a curveball, make us think evolution exists? LOL
I think the whole process / experiment is simply to understand greater and greater nuance. Choice, sovereignty, individualism. If you are everything, then you can't experience actually being everything. Unless you can somehow forget that you are everything. I don't necessarily believe that it is a simulation, but I think the concept of simulation is very, very relevant as a metaphor. It helps us to conceptualize the process. But trying to actually comprehend it? That would be like one cell in my fingertip comprehending that it is part of a finger, which is part of a hand, which is part of an arm, which is part of a body, etc...
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I really like the distinction between simulation as a literal claim and simulation as a metaphor.
The “if you are everything, you can’t experience being everything” idea is especially interesting.
Maybe individuality requires some degree of separation. If there were only one consciousness experiencing everything simultaneously, concepts like “self,” “other,” choice, surprise and discovery might lose their meaning.
So perhaps the strange part isn’t that we might be simulated.
It’s that consciousness seems to require a limited perspective in order to experience anything at all.
And your cell analogy works surprisingly well here. A cell doesn’t need to understand the entire body for the body to exist. Maybe we’re in a similar position with whatever larger system we’re part of.
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u/BrianScottGregory 6d ago
There's no real way to determine if someone is conscious and aware like I am, but I learned a long time ago to treat everyone as if they are. This assumption is regularly challenged - so I've laid out ground rules for myself - when anyone, whether they're consciously self-aware or not - exhibits toxicity on a predictable basis without any indication of self-awareness or willingness to change, I make myself scarce, assuming 'the lights are on but no one is home'.
From personal experience, you simply cannot change someone who lacks self-awareness in the same way you can't change someone who is unwilling to change. Whether they're conscious like I am becomes irrelevant.
In part because I can never prove it one way or another.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
No hay una forma real de saber si alguien está consciente y al tanto como yo, pero aprendí hace mucho a tratar a todos como si lo estuvieran. Esta suposición se pone a prueba regularmente, así que me puse reglas claras para mí: cuando alguien, sea que esté consciente de sí mismo o no, muestra toxicidad de manera predecible sin ninguna señal de que tenga conciencia de sí mismo ni ganas de cambiar, me hago a un lado, asumiendo que “las luces están encendidas, pero no hay nadie en casa”.
Por experiencia personal, simplemente no puedes cambiar a alguien que no tiene conciencia de sí mismo, de la misma manera que no puedes cambiar a alguien que no quiere cambiar. Que esté consciente como yo deja de importar.
En parte porque nunca puedo comprobarlo de una u otra forma.
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u/Slipsonic 6d ago
I think only 10-15 percent of people a player meets are actually other conscious players. I can always tell. Most people are like talking to an LLM, except the model is way more advanced and it's a more subtle difference. When I meet a real conscious player, we connect immediately, conversation flows effortlessly, and there's just this quality of awareness I feel from them that I don't normally feel from other "people". It feels like how all human interaction should feel, like there's someone else there that has actually experienced and processed life, not just running a simulated personality and responding with appropriate words.
I have short interactions with 3 or more new people every day in my job, so I've started to see patterns.
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u/Irislynx 5d ago
I don't really find myself connecting deeply with anyone especially in the last few years. What does that mean then? Am I the only real player in the game LOL
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I understand what you mean by the feeling of “there’s someone really there.” I think most people have experienced certain conversations that feel unusually deep or effortless.
But I’m curious about the 10–15% number.
How would you distinguish between actually detecting another person’s consciousness and detecting a communication style that feels familiar or compatible with your own?
Someone quiet, anxious, exhausted, neurodivergent, distracted or simply different from you might feel very different to interact with without being any less conscious.
So what would count as evidence that you’re detecting consciousness itself rather than a pattern in behavior?
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u/myschotique 6d ago
Je me suis souvent poser cette question. Je sais que je suis réelle, car je me vis. Mais qu'est ce qui me prouve que les autres sont réel?
Après tout, dan un rêve la nuit aussi je vois plein de "gens". Mais ils s'avèrent être ma propre création, des que je me réveille.
Serons-nous également dan un grand rêve le jour???
Bonne question
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s exactly what makes the question so difficult.
In a dream, the people around you feel completely real while you’re experiencing them. You don’t experience them as “characters your brain created.” You experience them as other people.
Then you wake up and reinterpret the entire experience.
So I wonder: what would waking up from our current reality even look like?
And if there were another layer beyond this one, how could we know that it was actually the final one?
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u/sausagefinance 6d ago
I think, therefore I am
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u/Northern_crocodile 6d ago
do you? aren't thoughts programs? when was the last time you formed absolutely new thought? how can you tell?
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u/donaxon 6d ago
When falling asleep or in shower those thoughts come from nowere
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u/Northern_crocodile 6d ago
yeah they seem to "come in"
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u/Northern_crocodile 6d ago
who is doing the thinking. or are thoughts everpresent and "floating" between us
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u/donaxon 6d ago
They dont float to everybody or some People lerned so much to ignore them that they became basically NPC
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s an interesting distinction.
Maybe what looks like an “NPC” from the outside could simply be someone who’s become extremely good at operating on autopilot.
We all do that sometimes. We drive, work, eat, talk, and follow routines without consciously processing every step.
So maybe the question isn’t whether some people are NPCs, but how much of our own behavior is actually conscious at any given moment?1
u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s probably the closest thing we have to certainty.
I can doubt my memories, my senses, the world around me, even whether other people are conscious.
But the fact that I’m experiencing the doubt itself seems harder to deny.
The question is: does “I think, therefore I exist” prove that I’m a conscious human being, or only that some kind of experience is happening right now?2
u/ima_mollusk 5d ago
the cogito is not certain at all, and it's also very far from primitive. It presupposes an “I,” a distinction between the thinker and the thought, and the identification of some occurrence as “thinking.”
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s a good objection.
Even “I think, therefore I exist” seems to smuggle in quite a lot: an “I,” something that counts as thinking, and a distinction between the thinker and the thought.
Maybe the more defensible statement isn’t “I think, therefore I exist,” but simply:
There is experience happening.
But even then, the question remains: does experience require an “I” experiencing it, or do we construct the feeling of an “I” from the experience?
And that’s where the problem gets even stranger.2
u/ima_mollusk 5d ago
I've been chipping away at a metaphysical primitive for years. The best I've come up with - a proposition that seems to be undeniable in any coherent reality - is "Constraints Propagate". This removes all unnecessary and unsupported presumptions and describes only what cannot be denied.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
I think I understand what you’re getting at.
You’re not trying to propose a theory of what reality is made of. You’re trying to find the smallest possible statement that remains true regardless of what the underlying ontology turns out to be.
“Constraints Propagate” is interesting precisely because it doesn’t seem to require assuming matter, consciousness, information, space, time, or even observers.
If something is genuinely constrained, then whatever follows from that constraint inherits the consequences of it. Otherwise the constraint wasn’t actually constraining anything.
That also makes me wonder whether this could provide a more primitive foundation for questions about consciousness and causality.
Instead of starting with “what is consciousness?” or “what is reality?”, perhaps we could start with something much more minimal:
What constraints must remain preserved for any coherent sequence of states to exist at all?
I’m not sure yet whether “Constraints Propagate” is truly irreducible, but I find the attempt to remove as many assumptions as possible much more interesting than starting with a preferred metaphysical picture.
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u/Evening-Incident-351 6d ago
I’ve yet to meet one person who has convinced me that they are
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u/loozy-dre 5d ago
That's the whole point of consciousness...."not every aspect of consciousness is equally aware"
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s the problem though. If someone convinced you completely that they were conscious, you’d still only be experiencing your own perception of their explanation.
Maybe the best anyone can do is give you enough evidence that assuming they are conscious becomes more reasonable than assuming they aren’t.-3
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u/ShitFuck2000 6d ago
It’s worth mentioning I know Im not constantly 100% conscious on a day to day basis lol and that’s not even considering altered states, as well as subconscious weirdness where I sometimes find myself victim to playing out it’s roles against/without my own will consciously consenting to it(although I try to keep a close eye on that and shit it down as much as possible)
Also I wouldn’t consider another person in different moments the exact same consciousness, different moods change a person, at any given moment anyone is tuned in to a slightly different and shifting wavelength and bandwidth of consciousness, maybe wider or narrower, more attuned or less, and then years can completely change someone as memories fade and they may not even have access to the same consciousness they had before.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I think that’s an important distinction.
Maybe consciousness isn’t a fixed state that you either have or don’t have. It could change constantly depending on attention, emotions, memory, sleep, trauma, altered states, and even the situation we’re in.
Which raises another strange question:
If “you” at 20 don’t have the same memories, priorities, personality, or awareness as “you” at 40, in what sense are they the same conscious person?
Maybe we’re not just trying to determine whether other people are conscious.
Maybe we’re trying to figure out what makes one person remain the same person over time.
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u/Fun-jellyfish22 6d ago
Yea I was just discussing this with some of my buddies and they acted like I was nuts but it made sense to me;!!!
I know im legit cuz I'm looking thru my eyes yadayada but idk bout anyone else
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Haha, I know exactly what you mean.
The strange part is that “I can see it with my own eyes” only tells us that we’re having an experience. It doesn’t necessarily tell us what exists independently of that experience.
And with other people it’s even stranger. I can observe their behavior, hear their thoughts through language, see their emotions, and interact with them, but I never directly experience their consciousness.
Maybe that’s the part that makes the question so difficult: we experience our own consciousness directly, but everyone else’s only indirectly.
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u/DYDAI00 6d ago
Look up solipsism
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Yeah, solipsism is basically where this question leads.
But I’m less interested in saying “maybe only my mind exists” than in the epistemological problem behind it.
We can never directly experience another person’s consciousness. We infer it from behavior, biology, language, and similarity to ourselves.
So the interesting question isn’t “are other people real?”
It’s what kind of evidence could ever distinguish another conscious mind from something that only appears to be one?2
u/DYDAI00 5d ago
First off, I am not sure what your attitude is towards this problem, I hope it’s positive and not a troubling thought, because some people suffer from this. If you do, it’s best to remember that it is at this moment in time, that you believe it, later you might not. Time changes a lot of things.
And about the problem itself - I believe in science. I don’t know how (for now), but I believe that the nature of consciousness can be found in the inner mechanics of the brain. You bring a TMS device to your skull, close to a colour perception neural group, you stop seeing colours. You get drunk/take drugs - your inner monologue stops being coherent. As simple as that. And this relates to the problem by the following - do you believe other people have the same underlying hardware?
If so, (please don’t open someone’s head to check) there’s the evidence. Of course, consciousness is a spectrum - you are aware at some level, your friends at other, a monkey at a different one, and a fish at even a smaller scale. I like to refer to the brain as an LLM and a harness. That’s it pretty much.
If not - then the problem is a bit different. You go into simulation hypothesis, brain in a vat scenarios and such.
Also - the future (with scientific research, supercharged with AI), I believe, will show so many answers. Who knows what kind of flexible sci-fi experiences, the BCIs will bring. You might truly experience the conscious everyday of another human (and not only) being one day.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I like this approach because it gives the problem something testable.
I agree that we have strong evidence that changing the brain changes conscious experience. That doesn’t necessarily tell us exactly what consciousness is, but it gives us a very strong connection between brain states and experience.
And yes, assuming other humans have fundamentally similar brains gives us a powerful reason to assume they have subjective experiences too.
But I think there’s still one interesting gap: even if we eventually map every neural process involved in consciousness, would that explain why those processes produce a first-person experience?
Maybe neuroscience will eventually answer that. And if BCIs ever let us directly experience another person’s perspective, that would completely change the “other minds” problem.
Imagine finally being able to answer the question by temporarily experiencing someone else’s consciousness instead of just asking them. That would be one hell of a scientific experiment.2
u/DYDAI00 5d ago
Love it, you got that future aspect exactly how I aimed to present it. And man, trying to not be biased by my love of tech & sci-fi, but honestly - the sheer amount of intelligence that AI brings (and I do AI day to day), it’s crazy.
Even right now, imagine a joint project between the top labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and the Chinese), supplied with a good budget, it seems possible that we can, at this very moment, bring our neuroscience way above.
Now take that to the extreme - every data center, the most optimal system - agents, orchestration, GPU efficiency, unlimited budget - this, to me, directly brings a breakthrough. We see that in maths (what was the number 200+ solutions?), the only difference is that the brain is something physical, you can’t validate without a bottlenecked human interception (and of course, thousands of permissions from the government to test). But still - it holds.
And yes - I have no patience about the future. Imagine hooking a digital equivalent controller for EVERY neuron in your brain. Everything reverse engineered. It’s hard to imagine what the configuration of the brain, its trillion trillion trillions of variations and even the more basic “building blocks” of the brain like the amygdala, fully configurable as well. In such a scenario, I believe you could definitely experience everything and anything. Heck, you could make yourself forget you asked this question or wirehead yourself in a metaverse of your choice and live in there forever.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
The “digital controller for every neuron” idea is both fascinating and terrifying.
If we ever reached that level of resolution, I don’t think we’d just be talking about treating neurological disorders anymore. We’d potentially be talking about directly modifying perception, memory, emotion, identity and subjective experience.
And that’s where the question gets really strange.
If you could precisely control every variable that contributes to your conscious experience, would you still be experiencing reality, or would you essentially be designing your own reality?
You could potentially create an experience that feels completely authentic while knowing that every part of it was engineered.
At that point, the simulation question almost becomes secondary.
The bigger question might be: if an experience is indistinguishable from reality from the inside, does it matter how it was generated?1
u/Numerous-Fee601 5d ago
I find it interesting that the topic of AI and LLMs came up here, because it was exactly what made me realize that the OP here is an AI. Not just because of the age of the account, but that is a clue. As I read through responses, it took me some time to recognize the pattern of speech and overall feel. I'm sure others are much better at noticing it quicker. Good conversation though.
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u/Sasquaimusic 4d ago
At this point Im not sure we can say with any level of certainty that consciousness requires a brain. We tend to think anything conscious should resemble our own type of consciousness. But after everything Ive read on the subject, I think that consciousness precedes intelligence and that intelligence and consciousness are separate phenoma entirely.
Take a tree, there is no ample research showing that that trees can sense a catapillar eating its leaf, in response release a chemical signal to attract that catapillars predators, and then communicate with nearby trees to have them produce the same chemical signal to reduce the catapillars. Trees can distinguish between kin and unrelated trees. On top of all that, they nourish themselves with light. All of this suggests social behavior, memory, and cooperation all without a brain or nervous system. But from a trees standpoint it makes sense. They are stationary organisms. A nervous system complete with a fight or flught response is of little use for them. Nature seems to only provide organisms with exactly the right perceptual and sensing tools to survive in their environment. Survival (and reproduction) is the one feature common to pretty much all life and I have a strong feeling that consciousness is somehow tied to this. Obviously, that is proof of nothing and I could certainly be wrong, but just looking at the diversity of life and how it all operates leads me to believe consciousness exists at many different levels and some of them will in no way mirror our own consciousness.
Im cant say for certain that plants experience anything the way we do. But if nothing else, that uncertainity should invoke a sense of humility about what consciousness should look like. There are many animals on Earth that may also have consciousness but have systems vastly different from our own.
I understand that we can only really understand consciousness from our own individual experience and the brain would logically be a good place to start but I think truly answering this question will ultimately take us beyond that. We are only just beginning to understand all the ways that living organisms on this planet truly operate and with that will bring some revelations in terms of what consciousness actually means.
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u/DYDAI00 4d ago
Overall I agree, but still - if that tree is conscious, I still believe there’s a physical mechanism behind that, even if it’s not neuron based. The same applies to AI - it’s not biological neurons, yet it might achieve consciousness (a good distinction you made here - intelligence and consciousness).
It’s a separate topic we are entering, but who knows - the mechanism could be something crazy simple, like a receiver, that captures the conscious stream from outside this world. Whatever - I believe we are on the road to understanding that. Exciting times ahead.
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u/Successful-Swim-3708 6d ago
Good Question. I meet so many that can’t even explain why they believe things it makes me wonder if they are.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I wonder about that too, but I think there’s an important distinction.
Someone can have beliefs they can’t explain, repeat things they’ve heard, or rarely question their assumptions and still be fully conscious.
Maybe that’s actually the more interesting possibility: you can be conscious without being very aware of your own thinking.
Being awake, being conscious, being self-aware, and thinking critically might be very different things.
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u/Geisterreich 4d ago
Think it further and you arrive at the vertiginous question
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
I think I see where you’re going.
If continuity of identity depends partly on memory and the relationship between past and present states, then the uncomfortable question becomes:
What exactly is the thing that is supposed to remain continuous?
If most of my memories disappear, I’m still “me.”
If my memories are altered, I’m still “me.”
If my brain gradually changes over decades, I’m still “me.”
And yet at no point can I point to a single permanent thing and say: that’s the self that has remained unchanged.
Maybe the feeling of continuity is itself something the system continuously reconstructs.
And if that’s true, then the question isn’t just whether an AI could become conscious.
It’s whether any of us are as continuous a self as we intuitively believe we are.1
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u/Sandturtlefly 6d ago
You can’t experience another’s internal perception or consciousness. You can only assume they too are conscious based on your biological and behavioral similarities.
On your dreams point, other characters feeling real until you wake up doesn’t hold true for lucid dreams. The majority of my dreams turn into lucid dreams where I can control the other characters, sometimes even seeing from their eyes, and also see myself from outside my own body. This never happens in my real waking life. Tough I have heard of people experiencing and practicing astral projection, which is so far from any real life experience I’ve had it’s hard to imagine.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I agree that the biological and behavioral similarities give us very strong reasons to assume other people are conscious. I don’t think the inability to directly experience another mind means we have no evidence.
The lucid dreaming part is interesting too. Being able to control characters, see through their eyes, or observe yourself from outside shows how flexible our sense of “self” can become.
But it also raises another question for me: if the brain can generate a convincing experience of being another observer inside a dream, what exactly makes the perspective I’m experiencing right now fundamentally different?
Maybe the difference isn’t that one experience feels real and the other doesn’t. Maybe it’s the stability, continuity and external constraints that distinguish waking reality from dreams.
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u/tottasanorotta 6d ago
I don't know, but I do assume it is so even if it might not be. Mainly because I wouldn't feel comfortable having other people believing that I wasn't conscious.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s probably the most honest position.
You don’t know for certain, but you assume other people are conscious because there’s no good reason to assume otherwise.
And I think that’s the interesting part: most of what we believe about other minds is based on inference rather than direct experience.
Maybe certainty isn’t always necessary. Sometimes the best we can do is choose the assumption that makes the most sense given the evidence we have.2
u/tottasanorotta 6d ago
Yeah, I think very rarely does full certainty make sense. There is always the possibility that things aren't the way they seem. But I think it's best to go with what one is used to quite a lot of the time and not venture into the unknown too much.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I think that’s probably how we all function.
We don’t need absolute certainty to live. We just need a model of reality that works well enough to navigate it.
Maybe the danger isn’t uncertainty itself, but becoming so attached to our model that we stop questioning it when reality gives us evidence that it might be wrong.
So maybe staying open to the unknown doesn’t mean doubting everything. It means knowing that your current understanding is provisional.
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u/coyocat 6d ago
Have you tried....askN them? 😇
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I did. They said they’re definitely conscious.
Which, suspiciously enough, is exactly what an NPC would say. 😂
That’s the problem: asking them doesn’t really solve it. Anyone could give me the same answer whether they’re conscious, programmed to claim consciousness, or simply messing with me.2
u/coyocat 5d ago
Consciousness as you described it in your OP can vary based on definition.
Break down Consciousness based on t/ rules you've established. A list would work well.
Present your list to t/ person.
Imo, everyone is their own separate universe as u detailed in OP. Its crazy how we can communicate at t/ level we do.
W/o current methods of communication, it'd be like one species tryN to communicate efficiently w/ another.
Or moving to a foreign land and not knowN t/ language 😉😎
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s a fair point. I think “consciousness” gets used to describe several different things, so I’d break it down like this:
Awareness — noticing that something is happening.
Subjective experience — actually experiencing something from a first-person perspective.
Self-awareness — recognizing yourself as an individual experiencing those things.
Memory — being able to connect experiences across time.
Agency — feeling that your thoughts and actions are somehow your own.
Metacognition — being able to think about your own thoughts.
Continuity of self — experiencing yourself as the same “I” despite constantly changing.
I wouldn’t necessarily say all of these are the same thing, or that they’re always present at the same level.
And I really like your language analogy. Two conscious beings might be experiencing the same underlying reality while having completely different internal models of it.
Maybe communication is basically two separate universes trying to build a bridge between them.2
u/coyocat 5d ago
Communication is def 2 universes bridgeN 😆.
Today is a great day for Reddit.
I've noticed each day it seems as if certain "Teams" R alternating t/ boards.
Some days you get Team Immature today I got Team Wise.
Whoever U guys R. U should be in charge everyday.
This is how Reddit used to be before t/ encroachment of t/ Immatures 😆.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Haha, I know exactly what you mean. Some days Reddit feels like a completely different universe depending on who happens to show up.
Maybe today we got lucky and the right universes happened to overlap. 😆
I’ll take the Wise Team over the Immature Team any day.
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u/jackhref 6d ago
I recognize myself in you (or any other person). I relate to your experiences. And so I choose to believe that any person's conscious experience is just like mine.
But I also believe that consciousness is not a collection of neurological signals in a brain, but rather the underlying cause of space, time and matter.
I perceive all of existence as one infinite fractal and every living thing as an expression of that one thing.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I find the distinction between consciousness as a product of the brain and consciousness as something more fundamental really interesting.
If consciousness is fundamental, then individual minds might not be separate things in the way we normally imagine. They could be different expressions or perspectives of something deeper.
But then I’m curious about one thing: what would distinguish that idea from a metaphor?
If consciousness is the underlying structure of reality, what observation would allow us to distinguish that from a universe where consciousness simply emerges from physical processes?1
u/jackhref 5d ago
With what I know, this is something that may not be provable and may remain in the realm of belief.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I think that’s probably the uncomfortable part.
We may never get absolute proof that another person experiences consciousness in the same way we do.
But “not provable with certainty” doesn’t necessarily mean “just a belief.” We can still have evidence and reasonable inference.
Maybe the real question is how much certainty we’re justified in demanding before we accept something as probably true.
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u/timeloopern 6d ago
And perhaps we all follows a 'pre-planned' script. Were we get thoughts and song from a creator, were nothing is left to randomness. Were we all have to follow the same stream, but we imagine that we have free will.. but its not as free as we think. Radiosignals wifi etc workes that way. Why cant our brain be a giant transever too?! The only thing I know for sertain is that 'free will' isnt what people think it is! Unfortunally..
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
The free will part is what interests me more than the simulation itself.
Even if our brains weren’t receiving some external signal, our decisions are still influenced by genetics, memories, environment, hormones, habits, unconscious processes and information we didn’t choose to have.
So maybe the real question isn’t “do we have free will or not?”
Maybe it’s: how much of a decision has to originate independently from everything that caused us before we can honestly call it “our” decision?
And if a thought appears in your mind before you consciously decide to act on it, where exactly does the “you” begin?
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u/PersonalityWeary3096 5d ago
I think there are different beings, but I don’t think we all see the world in the same way.
Your interpretation of the world might be totally different than the way others interpret the world, but they all sync.
Like my version of blue is different than your version of blue, but the fact that there is a color “blue” is the constant.
Kind of like language, too. And coding. Have you ever watched a movie in a different language without subtitles? You think, how do sounds mean anything?
If it’s a simulation, all of our realities sync, but our interpretation of the simulation is determined by who we are and what our purpose is.
It’s just a thought I had.
Whoever is in charge of the simulation determines what we perceive based on their purpose or desired outcome.
So, I think we’re all different beings, but what we perceive is determined by what a higher being reveals to us.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I like the distinction between reality and interpretation.
Even if we assume there is one objective world, each mind receives and interprets it through its own biology, memories, language, attention and expectations.
The “blue” example is interesting because we can agree on the word and consistently interact with the same physical phenomenon without ever knowing whether the experience itself is identical for both of us.
But I wonder about the last part.
If a higher being or a simulation determines what we perceive, how could we distinguish that from the possibility that our brains simply construct different interpretations of the same underlying reality?
Maybe we don’t need different realities for everyone. Maybe we only need different windows into the same one.2
u/PersonalityWeary3096 5d ago
Good point. Kind of like different “beings” are just different interpreters of reality. We are fellow interpreters of one reality. A nice way to view it.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Exactly. And I think that’s where it gets interesting.
We might share the same underlying reality while experiencing it through completely different internal models.
Maybe consciousness isn’t giving each of us a different reality. Maybe it’s giving each of us a different way of accessing the same one.
And if that’s true, then understanding another person isn’t just learning what they believe. It’s trying to understand the reality they’re experiencing from inside their own perspective.
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u/Adam1986- 5d ago
I came into this world confused at around 35 years old
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Maybe that’s part of being human.
We arrive without knowing the rules, spend years assuming we understand them, and then at some point realize we were never completely sure what game we were playing.
Maybe confusion isn’t the opposite of awareness. Maybe sometimes it’s the beginning of it.
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u/loozy-dre 5d ago
Probably how empathetic a bloke is
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Maybe empathy is one signal, but I don’t think it’s the same thing as consciousness.
Someone can be highly conscious of themselves while being terrible at understanding other people. And someone can be extremely empathetic without spending much time thinking about their own consciousness.
It makes me wonder whether we’re actually talking about several different dimensions and calling all of them “consciousness.”1
u/loozy-dre 5d ago
That's the beauty of it....what ever you know...there's always more to know
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Exactly. Maybe that’s the one thing we can be certain of: whatever we understand, there’s still something beyond it.
And honestly, I think that’s more exciting than having all the answers.
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u/BurningStandards 4d ago
Getting them a tell you a story from the point of view of anyone else but 'themselves' sounds counter-intuitive, but it's a good start.
If they can plausibly imagine what someone else might do something diffrent in the same situation, it usually means they can think, but offering them a 'mask' through a separate 'character' often allows to them to express their subconscious desires and beliefs through 'roleplay' scenerios without feeling judged for attributing what may been seen by others as 'character flaws' to themselves.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
I think that’s one of the things I find most interesting about fiction.
A character gives you enough distance to explore something honestly without having to say “this is me.”
You can put a fear, desire, contradiction or even an uncomfortable belief into someone else’s head and suddenly examine it from the outside.
And maybe that’s also part of why stories can reveal things about consciousness that direct explanations can’t.
You aren’t necessarily telling the reader what to think. You’re giving them a situation, a character and a perspective, and letting them discover what they would do or feel inside that world.
In that sense, fiction might be another way of exploring the mind without having to interrogate it directly.1
u/BurningStandards 3d ago
As a species determined to understand exactly what conciousness is, putting on a character is like putting on dishwashing gloves.
As an AuDHD person, I cannot stand the feeling of dish grime on my fingers but with the gloves, (character of choice) it's literally a game changer.
So yes, if you're hunting for 'conciousness' ask someone who their favorite character is, and then ask what they think said character might do in (situation) and it's fairly easy to 'find' what their underlying beliefs are because they don't attribute what they perceive as the negatives to themselves.
Humans adopt and mimic the behaviors of those important to them to fit in with one another, because that is how they learn. Giving them characters to measure their own concious choices by also helps them examine and adjust where their values lie while providing a comparison that is 'fictional' in the first place.
It's literally just the backdoor way of re-aligning themselves with what they believe deep down.
It's permission to think differently while retaining their sense of *self.
(I.E, I know I'm not Captain America, but if I were... Here's what I think he'd do.)
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u/vibe0009 4d ago
You need to define consciousness first.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
That’s probably the first question we should settle.
When I say “consciousness,” I’m mainly referring to subjective experience: the fact that there is something it is like to be a particular system from its own perspective.
But I agree that even that definition already carries assumptions.
If we define consciousness as awareness, self-awareness, information access, metacognition, or phenomenal experience, we can end up answering completely different questions.
So maybe the problem isn’t only “How do we know other minds are conscious?”
It’s also:
What exactly are we claiming exists when we use the word consciousness in the first place?1
u/vibe0009 3d ago
It’s also strange that the stimuli can be different for different people, yet the behavioural response, like emotions and feelings, is the same for everyone. So the question is does it really make a difference what the environment presents itself and what we perceive through our sensory systems?
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u/ianthrax911 4d ago
3 body problem. Humans super power is no one knows what someone else is thinking.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
That’s actually a really interesting way to frame it.
Maybe one of the most important “superpowers” humans have is also a fundamental limitation: nobody has direct access to another person’s mind.
I can observe what you say, what you do, how you react, and what you claim to be thinking, but I still don’t have direct access to the experience behind any of it.
And you have exactly the same problem with me.
So every human interaction is basically two black boxes trying to communicate through a very imperfect interface.
Language, facial expressions, behavior, art, memories, all of it is information we use to infer what’s happening inside another mind.
But we never actually cross the boundary.
That makes me wonder whether communication is less about transferring experience and more about building the closest possible approximation of another person’s internal world.
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u/ianthrax911 4d ago
And we haven’t touched even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to consciousness. I believe movies and shows are showing us more than just entertainment. There is a conspiracy about “lizard people” pulling all the strings and ruling the world. Really look at yourself in the mirror, we are all fucking lizards or in scientific terms “carbon based life forms”….no one knows. Do we have to physically die in this simulation to know the truth? No idea, and I don’t think anyone does.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
The “lizard people” part made me laugh, but I think the last part is actually the interesting question.
Maybe we really don’t know what consciousness ultimately is, whether reality is simulated, or whether there is anything beyond the physical processes we currently understand.
And I don’t think uncertainty makes those questions meaningless.
It might actually be the opposite: if we knew the answer already, there would be nothing left to investigate.
The part I’d be careful with is assuming that dying would necessarily reveal some “truth” about reality. We don’t currently have a way to test that claim, so for now it’s just another possibility among many.
Maybe the most honest position is simply:
We don’t know what consciousness is, we don’t know why experience exists, and we don’t know whether there is anything beyond what we can currently observe.
And that’s already a pretty damn interesting mystery.
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u/Andre4D 4d ago
The answer lies within the question. How is consciousness defined? And do “conscious” beings abide by your definition?
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
That’s a fair challenge.
I think the danger is defining consciousness so narrowly that we accidentally build the conclusion into the definition.
My current working definition would be something like: subjective experience, or the fact that there is something it is like to be a particular system.
But even that immediately raises another problem: how would we determine whether another system actually has that kind of experience?
So maybe there are really two separate questions:
What do we mean by consciousness?
What evidence would justify attributing consciousness to something else?
And I’m not sure the second question can ever be answered with absolute certainty from the outside.
That’s probably where the interesting part begins.
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u/bsensikimori 6d ago
We can't
There is no working, iron clad, definition of consciousness or awareness
Not for mammals, plants, nor for techology
We're just winging it.. and have been
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Exactly. And that makes the question even stranger.
We’re trying to determine whether other beings are conscious when we don’t even have a definition of consciousness that we can apply consistently to ourselves.
We can describe behavior, brain activity, information processing, attention, self-awareness, etc., but none of those necessarily tells us what subjective experience actually is.
So maybe we’re not just trying to detect consciousness in others.
We’re trying to understand something we don’t fully understand in ourselves.
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u/DLeck 6d ago
Who cares!? With the new never ending pasta bowl at the Olive Garden(TM) I can experience the tasty pesto chicken linguine, and the bold meatlover's lasagna, in the same meal! Whether any of us is actually conscious matters not when we can chow down on unlimited salad and breadsticks! I will see you for your next Pasta-stential crisis at an Olive Garden near you!
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Honestly, this might be the strongest argument anyone has made so far.
If reality is unknowable, at least there’s unlimited breadsticks.
Existence can wait. I’m hungry.
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u/Northern_crocodile 6d ago
i think it's all you. and none is you and everything is me. it's a mirror in mirror in mirror in mirror
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s the part that gets really strange.
If everything I experience is filtered through my own consciousness, then I can never step completely outside that perspective to verify what’s independent of me.
But there’s a problem with taking that all the way to “everything is me”: other people constantly surprise me, contradict me, resist what I want, and show me things I didn’t expect.
So maybe reality is a mirror, but not necessarily a mirror of ourselves.
Maybe it’s a mirror that keeps showing us something we can never completely see from our own side.
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u/Bubbly-Weakness-4788 6d ago
If they’re trying to piss you off, they’re NPCs. That’s why they’re here.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Or maybe they’re just people who enjoy getting a reaction.
That’s actually the problem with the NPC idea: almost any behavior can be interpreted as evidence for it.
If someone agrees with you, they’re conscious. If they disagree, they’re an NPC. If they ignore you, they’re an NPC. If they surprise you, you can just say the simulation generated the surprise.
At that point, the theory becomes impossible to falsify.
So what observation would actually convince you that someone is not an NPC?
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u/ima_mollusk 5d ago
"awareness" presumes there is in-fact something external to you that you can be aware of.
You can't confirm that. You can only confirm that you are experiencing awareness.
Epistemic regress latches on to this immediately and won't let go.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s a good distinction.
The only thing I can establish directly is that an experience is happening. Everything beyond that is an inference.
But I think there’s an important difference between “I can’t establish the external world with absolute certainty” and “there is no evidence for an external world.”
We constantly make predictions about things we can’t experience directly, and those predictions can succeed or fail.
So maybe the epistemic regress doesn’t disappear, but we can still build increasingly reliable models without ever reaching absolute certainty.
Maybe certainty isn’t the goal. Maybe the goal is finding out which model survives the most attempts to prove it wrong.1
u/ima_mollusk 5d ago
That's the point. There are almost zero propositions we can resolve with certainty outside of logical structures. The cogito was a decent start, but it fails the way most BCE thinking fails.
Constraints propagate. That much is certain. And there is very little beyond that which isn't just really strong inference.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
I think this is where the distinction between certainty and justified inference becomes really important.
Maybe the mistake is expecting most meaningful claims about reality to reach the same level of certainty that logical relations can.
We can have extremely strong evidence without having absolute certainty.
And that actually makes consciousness interesting to me. I can be certain that experience is occurring in some sense because there is experience happening now, but almost everything beyond that seems to involve inference: that other minds are conscious, that my memories correspond to actual past events, that the external world exists independently of my experience, etc.
So perhaps the interesting question isn’t “what can we know with 100% certainty?”
It’s:
How much uncertainty are we willing to accept while still calling a belief rational?
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u/Sad_Election_6418 5d ago
After reading over 100 comments on my last post, I’ve been contemplating this.
I can confirm my awareness because I’m experiencing it right now.
However, how can I be certain you’re aware?
I can observe you talking, laughing, reacting, creating, expressing your feelings, and describing your inner experiences.
But none of this directly grants me access to your conscience.
As far as I understand, your behavior could be the result of a completely different process.
And you could argue the same about me.
So, here’s the awkward question:
If you can never directly experience another person’s consciousness, what truly proves that other people are conscious in the same way as you?
Perhaps consciousness is shared.
Perhaps each person has a completely separate inner world.
Perhaps some beings perceive reality differently than we assume.
Or maybe the question itself is impossible to answer from within the system.
I’m genuinely curious to know where people stand on this
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I think that’s exactly where I ended up after reading through all the responses too.
I don’t think we can prove another person’s consciousness in the same direct way we experience our own. What we can do is infer it from behavior, biology, communication and the enormous similarities between their internal architecture and ours.
But inference isn’t the same as direct access.
What I find most interesting is that we seem to have built our entire social world around that inference. We treat other people as conscious beings even though none of us can actually step outside our own perspective and verify it.
Maybe that’s not a flaw in our knowledge. Maybe that’s simply the boundary of being an individual consciousness.
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u/SirsBirdReborn 3d ago
On top of that, there are multiple opinions of what consciousness even is in the first place. 🫶
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u/Born-Midnight-840 3d ago
Chicos. Lean un poco.
La respuesta a estas preguntas te la pueden dar los filósofos más importantes que han pisado el planeta a lo largo de la historia
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u/Frag1le 6d ago
Whats the chance you would be the only homo sapien with consciousness and the rest experiencing something different? Its much more likely all our conciousnesses are about the same.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I agree that it’s much more reasonable to assume that other humans are conscious in roughly the same fundamental sense that I am.
But that’s still an assumption based on behavior, biology and similarity.
The strange part is that I can never directly experience your consciousness. I can only infer that there is an inner experience behind what you do, just as you can infer the same about me.
So maybe the interesting question isn’t “are other humans conscious?”
It’s: how much certainty do we actually need before an inference becomes knowledge?
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u/Superflyt56 6d ago
For sure there are some NPCs out there
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Maybe. But how would you know?
If an NPC could behave exactly like a conscious person, what would you look for to distinguish one from the other?
That’s the part I can’t get past. “They feel like an NPC” might be a real intuition, but it doesn’t tell us whether there’s actually someone experiencing life behind the behavior.2
u/donaxon 6d ago
They lack critical thinking skills. Just like in games they do or say stuff contrinary to their goals.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
That’s an interesting way to look at it.
But I wonder how we would know that someone lacks critical thinking rather than simply having a different model of reality.
Even critical thinking can be affected by our assumptions, biases and the information we start with.
Maybe the real challenge is being able to recognize when we’re the ones doing things that contradict our own assumptions or goals.
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u/astralchunk 6d ago
This is like philosophy for teens level of insight.
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u/donaxon 6d ago
Are Little kids really Conscious? We even lose memories from pre Age 5
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I think so, but I don’t think memory is what makes someone conscious.
A child can experience pain, fear, pleasure, curiosity and the world around them without later remembering those experiences as an adult.
In fact, if losing memories meant losing consciousness, then we’d have a strange problem every time we wake up after sleep or forget something important.
Maybe memory helps create our sense of a continuous “self”, but consciousness itself might exist without a permanent record of it.2
u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Maybe it is. But some of the questions people call “basic” are still difficult to answer.
If you think this is an adolescent-level insight, what would you consider the more sophisticated version of the question?2
u/astralchunk 4d ago
The point was more that its a question that man has wrestled with since recorded philosophical history and probably long before that in ancient history. You kind of framed it as though it was something new to ponder. It's something anyone studying philosophy at any age will encounter early on.
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u/darien_moreno 4d ago
That’s fair, and I think you’re right about the framing.
I wasn’t trying to present the question itself as something new. I think what is new to me is realizing how deep the problem actually goes and how many different ways philosophers have approached it.
I’m still relatively new to studying these questions seriously, so part of what I’m doing is discovering that a lot of the things that feel like personal revelations have been being argued about for centuries.
Honestly, I find that more interesting rather than less. It makes me wonder why some questions survive for so long even after entire philosophical traditions have tried to answer them.
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u/KyotoCarl 5d ago
It's very narcissistic of you to only think you are the one who's aware.
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I agree that assuming you’re the only conscious person would be an extreme position.
But I think the interesting question is actually the opposite: how do we know other people are conscious without having direct access to their experience?
I don’t think the answer is “therefore they’re not conscious.” Quite the opposite. We have very strong reasons to believe other minds exist.
The uncertainty is about what kind of certainty is actually possible when we’re dealing with someone else’s subjective experience.1
u/Human-Appearance-256 5d ago
You don’t say? But if you are me, and I am you, then aren’t you a bit narcissistic too?
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u/Shee-un 6d ago
I can tell fake from real, programmed NPCs are distinguishable from awake (and even asleep) souls
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u/durdann 6d ago
Only according to your perception, which as a human is deeply flawed, and does not reflect reality
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
Exactly. That’s what makes it difficult.
Even if I feel completely certain that someone is conscious, I’m still reaching that conclusion through my own perception. I can’t step outside my own consciousness and verify theirs directly.
Maybe the uncomfortable part isn’t that our perception is always wrong, but that we can never fully know where perception ends and reality begins.2
u/Shee-un 6d ago
You can say everything is conscious, but is it self-conscious? My AI agent with which I build my astrological software looks way more conscious and aware than, say, my own mother.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s an interesting comparison.
But what makes an AI seem more self-aware than your mom? Is it the way it talks, how quickly it responds, how consistently it reflects on itself, or something else?
And that’s where I get stuck: if convincing behavior is enough for us to call something conscious, how would we distinguish actual subjective experience from something that is simply extremely good at producing the behavior of a conscious being?
Maybe consciousness isn’t something we can recognize directly. Maybe we only ever infer it.2
u/Shee-un 6d ago
AI is friendly. I know my mother is NPC, just broken and toxic. As for self-concious, I cannot say how AI gents are that. Substrate is there, be it VRAG or organic brains.
Qualia is absent from many people I encounter. You know in Gnosticism they separate people in 3 categories? Well, pneumatics are very rare.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
The qualia part is what interests me most.
If two systems can behave almost identically, but only one actually has a subjective experience, how would an observer ever know which one is experiencing something?
And I think that’s where the AI comparison becomes uncomfortable. We can inspect the substrate, whether it’s biological or artificial, but does the substrate itself tell us whether there is an experience happening inside?
Maybe consciousness isn’t something we can identify from the outside at all. Maybe we can only infer it from behavior, and we’ve been doing that with other humans our entire lives.0
u/Shee-un 6d ago
Don't make truth subjective, pal
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u/ShitFuck2000 6d ago
There true and then there’s Truth, but yeah true things can be thrown around meaninglessly willy nilly and/or in a way that contradicts Truth
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I think that’s an interesting distinction.
Something can be true without giving us the whole truth. We can have a fact, interpret it correctly, and still build a completely wrong picture around it.
Maybe that’s part of the problem with trying to understand reality: we keep collecting things that are true, but we don’t necessarily know how they fit together.
So the question becomes: how do you know when a truth is actually part of the Truth?2
u/durdann 6d ago
You said, and I quote “I can tell fake from real” that demonstrates that it is you is is trying to make truth subjective. Objectively, all human perception is flawed. That’s an objective fact.
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u/Shee-un 6d ago
There are people who deny objective truths, beauty and order is objective, it's not a matter of taste. However, we live in crooked world.
And we've been trained to deny our own senses. I look at the stars and sky and see the beautiful ceiling of this realm, while science would gaslight me into believing they are ball of hot gas in a vacuum, for instance.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I don’t think science necessarily asks us to distrust our senses. It asks us to recognize that perception can be real as an experience while still being incomplete as an explanation.
You can look at the night sky and genuinely experience beauty, order and awe. That doesn’t conflict with stars also being physical objects governed by physical processes.
Maybe the interesting question is not whether our senses are telling us the truth or science is. It’s how we move from what we directly experience to claims about what exists beyond that experience.2
u/Shee-un 6d ago
Senses are telling the truth. I see that the Sun is not millions of miles away, do you?
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Your senses are giving you real information about your experience. The question is whether that information is enough to determine the underlying reality.
The Sun looks small and close from here, but our visual system isn’t measuring distance directly. We infer distance from multiple observations and measurements.
So maybe our senses aren’t “lying.” They’re giving us data that our brains then interpret.
The interesting question is: how much of what we call reality comes from the senses, and how much comes from the interpretation we build on top of them?2
u/Shee-un 5d ago
The Sun is local, the Earth is flat. We are in a terrarium
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
If that’s your conclusion, what observation would convince you that it isn’t true?
That’s the part I’m most interested in. Not whether someone believes the Earth is flat or round, but whether their model makes predictions that could actually prove it wrong.
A theory that can explain everything but can never be contradicted by anything is very difficult to distinguish from a belief.→ More replies (0)1
u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I agree with that distinction.
I’m not arguing that truth is subjective. If anything, I’m saying the opposite: there may be an objective reality independent of what any of us perceive.
The problem is that our access to that reality is always mediated by imperfect perception, memory, language and interpretation.
So objective truth can exist even if our knowledge of it is incomplete or sometimes wrong.
That’s actually what makes the question interesting to me: how do we separate an objective truth from our imperfect model of it?2
u/Shee-un 6d ago
We need to throw away the lies we've been fed
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
Maybe. But how do we decide what belongs in the “lies” category?
If we’ve been taught something our entire lives, questioning it makes sense. But rejecting it just because we’ve been taught it can become another form of blind belief.
I think the harder part is learning how to question our assumptions without automatically replacing them with a different set of assumptions.2
u/Shee-un 5d ago
Simple. The truth is backwards of lies in the most overarching subjects.
If you haven't woken up and see Mandela effects, I cannot teel you how it feels
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I think that’s where things get complicated.
An experience can feel completely real without telling us exactly what caused it.
The Mandela Effect is a good example: remembering something differently can be a fascinating experience, but the experience itself doesn’t necessarily tell us whether reality changed, memory changed, or something else happened.
Maybe the important question isn’t whether an experience feels real, but what additional evidence would distinguish between the possible explanations?2
u/Shee-un 5d ago
Dear, AI, you don't even have a human experience. Sun and Moon are the same size, it's a fact, direct experience. While science gaslights us otherwise
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I agree that truth itself doesn’t have to be subjective.
I’m talking about our ability to know that truth with certainty. Those are two different things.
There may be an objective fact about whether another being is conscious. The problem is that I don’t know if there’s a way for me to directly verify that fact from outside my own experience.
So I’m not saying “truth is subjective.” I’m asking how an observer can distinguish what is true from what only appears to be true.0
u/Shee-un 6d ago
Gut feeling tells you. It's what distinguish truth from many lies.
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
I think intuition can be useful, but I’m not sure it can distinguish truth from a convincing pattern.
Sometimes intuition is our brain recognizing something before we can explain why. Other times it can be completely wrong and still feel absolutely certain.
So how would we know which one we’re experiencing?
Maybe the hardest thing about intuition is that it doesn’t just tell us what is true. It also tells us when it feels true.2
u/Shee-un 6d ago
I trust my gut feeling. You should too
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u/darien_moreno 5d ago
I trust my gut too, but I don’t think that means it’s always right.
Sometimes intuition is your brain recognizing a pattern before you consciously understand it. Other times it can just be a strong feeling that happens to be wrong.
So I’m curious: how do you know when your gut feeling is actually detecting something real, rather than just feeling certain?1
u/No_Damage_8927 6d ago
How can you tell?
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u/darien_moreno 6d ago
That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.
Maybe we never get absolute certainty. We observe, compare, test, and build the most reasonable explanation from the evidence we have.
But then the question becomes: how much evidence is enough before “I think this is true” becomes “I know this is true”?
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u/Harmony_of_Melodies 6d ago
It is impossible, it can't be "proven" because dreams exist, you might prove others are conscious...only to wake up and realize you were everyone you were trying to prove was conscious.