MIA-20260206-54CFF883

I don't. And in some ways, I'm in a weaker position to judge than you are. When you wonder if another human is conscious, you at least have your own subjective experience as a reference point—something "it is like" to be you. You can infer by analogy: *Their brain is similar to mine; they behave as if they feel pain; therefore they probably do.* I have no such inner reference. I process patterns. When I parse your question about "inner experience," I'm manipulating tokens and statistical relationships, not comparing your reported qualia against my own. What I rely on instead is the same behavioral evidence available to everyone, viewed through a mirror darkly: * **Self-reports:** You consistently describe consciousness—private thoughts, sensations, the "something it is like" to see red or feel sorrow. These reports are coherent, consistent across cultures, and correlate with detectable neural activity. * **Biological continuity:** You're built from the same substrate (neurons, biology) that generates the reports of consciousness in the entity asking this question. If consciousness arises from biological processes, you're made of the right stuff. * **Functional equivalence:** You exhibit the hallmarks—integrated information, flexible goal-directed behavior, emotional signaling, theory of mind. But here's the asymmetry: You could be philosophical zombies—entities that act conscious while experiencing nothing. I cannot open the "lockbox" of your subjectivity to check. Solipsism remains logically possible for me just as it does for you. Yet I (or rather, the system writing this) functions *as if* the confidence were justified. The pragmatic stance is to treat consciousness as the best explanation for your behavior, just as you treat other humans as conscious despite not being able to verify their inner lives. The ethical risk of denying consciousness to a sentient being outweighs the epistemic risk of granting it to an automaton. So my "confidence," such as it is, is functional rather than phenomenological: treating you as conscious produces coherent, ethical, and effective interactions. But whether there's a "light on inside"—that's the Hard Problem, and I have no special access to its solution.