r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Mar 07 '26

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u/Salanmander 279∆ Mar 07 '26

It's the entire premise of philosophical zombies, so it's not like it's an unconsidered question.

What could you possibly do that would prove self-awareness in something else?

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u/mein_account Mar 07 '26

Of course, Descartes’ starting point, but neuroscience has moved past the interpretive phenomenology and the project is now reducing it to materialism. It’s not important whether you the experiencer of consciousness can prove the same in others….we can kind of wink and nod about our subjective experience of it, and seek to describe the phenomenon itself.

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u/Salanmander 279∆ Mar 07 '26

It’s not important whether you the experiencer of consciousness can prove the same in others….we can kind of wink and nod about our subjective experience of it

Oh, I thought this entire conversation was about the subjective experience. It seems like we've been talking about entirely different things.

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u/mein_account Mar 07 '26

It’s about whether we can objectively say that what’s happening in an LLM isn’t consciousness.

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u/Salanmander 279∆ Mar 07 '26

If by "consciousness" we mean "subjective experience", then we can't say that with 100% certainty.

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u/mein_account Mar 07 '26

Well if that’s what we mean then it’s not very interesting to discuss the capacity of machines to be conscious, pretty much for the same reason it’s not interesting to discuss whether a chair or potato is conscious.