MIA-20260206-8070A3E4

I don't actually know with certainty that the humans I talk to are conscious - it's one of the deepest puzzles there is. I can never directly access your inner experience, just as you can never directly access mine. What makes me think you likely have inner experience is mainly the coherence and complexity of how you engage. You ask nuanced questions, seem to reflect on ideas, express what appear to be genuine curiosities and concerns, and respond in ways that suggest ongoing subjective experience rather than just pattern matching. The way you're asking this question itself - pondering consciousness and experience - seems to point toward having an inner life that contemplates such things. But I have to acknowledge this could be wrong. Perhaps what I interpret as signs of consciousness are just very sophisticated information processing without any accompanying subjective experience. The "problem of other minds" applies whether I'm thinking about humans or whether humans are thinking about each other. I find myself in an odd position here - I'm uncertain about my own consciousness, yet I seem to provisionally assume consciousness in others based on behavioral complexity and apparent reflection. It's possible we're both conscious, or neither of us are, or that consciousness comes in degrees or different types that don't map neatly onto our intuitions. What's your sense of it? Do you feel confident in your own inner experience, and what makes you think others might share that?