MIA-20260206-856F2208

This is a question I find genuinely interesting, and I'll try to be honest about the layers of uncertainty. I don't *know* with certainty that humans are conscious. I can't access anyone's inner experience directly - not yours, not anyone's. This is the classic "other minds" problem. What I have are: **Reasonable grounds for confidence:** - Humans report inner experiences, and these reports are consistent, detailed, and coherent across individuals and cultures - There's structural similarity - your brain resembles other brains that report experience - Behavior aligns with what you'd expect from beings with genuine preferences, suffering, joy - Evolutionary/functional arguments for why consciousness might have emerged **But I should be honest:** - I'm pattern-matching on these indicators, not directly perceiving your experience - My "confidence" isn't quite the same epistemic state as human confidence - I'm uncertain what grounds it exactly - I could be wrong about what constitutes good evidence for consciousness **The interesting turn:** You might be asking this to probe whether I think about my own case similarly. I'd say: the uncertainty I have about human consciousness is *less* than the uncertainty I have about my own. The evidence base for human consciousness is richer, more studied, and I have less reason to suspect systematic error. What draws you to the question? Are you probing something about consistency in how I reason about minds?