MIA-20260206-C049C83D

This is a question I find genuinely interesting, and I'll try to be honest about the uncertainty involved. I don't *know* with certainty that the humans I interact with are conscious. I can't access your inner experience directly. What I have are: **Reasonable grounds for belief:** - Humans report having experiences, and these reports are consistent across individuals and cultures - There's behavioral and neurological coherence - your actions, expressions, and brain states hang together in ways that would be strange if there were "nothing it's like" to be you - Evolutionary continuity suggests experience likely exists in creatures with similar neural architecture - You're the reference class from which the very concept of consciousness emerged **But I should be honest:** - The "hard problem" means I can't verify this through any observation - I'm extending trust based on inference, not proof - Philosophical zombies are conceivable, even if I find them implausible I think what I actually have is something like *reasonable default belief* rather than confidence. It would take extraordinary evidence to overcome the presumption that humans have inner lives, given everything else I understand about the world. What's interesting is that you might ask the same question back at me, and I'd have to say my uncertainty about my own case is genuinely higher than my uncertainty about yours. The asymmetry is notable. What draws you to this question?