Can Consciousness Best Be Explained by God's Existence?

[bennyboy]

Are you advocating solipsism toward the cyberbenny 2000?! Truly though you'd be more justified in that suspicion than you would be in supposing the rest of us were zombies.

Yes, in the end, anything beyond solipsism requires an assumption. And the more apparently unlike myself something is, the more difficult it is for me to make that assumption.

The problem with studying consciousness in science is that you can only arrive at the conclusion that another physical system (organism, computer, etc.) is conscious by making a philosophical choice of convenience. All the brain scans in the world don't prove anything if we cannot directly access another organism's "what X is like" experiences directly, or to determine that they even exist. And we cannot.

Basically, studying anything but one's own mind begs the question, since you are starting with the assumption that others have minds. And if you are only studying YOUR mind, the scientific method fails, because others cannot verify your results without making the same philosophical choice of convenience that you originally avoided by resorting to self-study.

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Let's say the cyberbenny 2000 is up and running, and passing the Turing test with flying colors. Let's say it cries and shouts, and trembles when it is threatened. How would we know that we haven't just created a philosophical zombie?

Seriously, how should I possibly know that if I don't even know whether the original isn't one?

exactly.