The Sequence · Part I · Why Bother

01. The Only Thing You Know Is Conscious

Solipsism, taken seriously rather than as a party trick.

Last revised 22 September 2026 · alpha

Solipsism gets handled as a party trick. You meet it around nineteen, you feel briefly seasick, somebody points out that it is unfalsifiable and therefore not worth arguing about, and you shelve it next to Zeno and the brain in a vat. It becomes a thing you have heard of. Nobody seriously organizes their philosophy around it, right?

The everyday version is not exotic. Is my toddler doing anything in there, or is he just a very sweet automaton in a diaper? (Don’t get me started on the newborn!) Is the language model that just wrote me a competent paragraph experiencing the writing of it, even if only for a few milliseonds of free electrons and holes whirring about in silicon? Is the person across the table from me experiencing lunch, or merely producing lunch-related behavior at an extremely high level of fidelity?

Most people, most of the time, answer yes-no-yes in the blink of an eye. The assumption is installed so deep that calling it just an assumption feels rude. But I do not know that you are conscious. I have never known. I have only my suspicions. And so it seems odd to me to leave at least the possibility outside of one’s moral calculus. Even if I was 99.9 percent sure that my fellow man was indeed conscious, and therefore deserves the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that I do, that niggling “what if” should be factored in at least a little bit.

Could we somehow test for qualia, beyond a shadow of a doubt? I assert “No”. I simply cannot picture what such a test would look like. Behavioral tests measure behavior, not qualia. Neural correlates measure correlates, but correlates of what, established how? By asking people what they were experiencing and checking it against some scanner? But that’s just a behavioral test in a white lab coat. Every instrument we have bottoms out in report, report is behavior, and behavior is precisely the thing a p-zombie produces perfectly, by construction.

(I remember reading the actual word “philosophical zombie” for the first time in second grade or so and just going “Oh, so there’s a name for what’s going on with my mom then.” The concept had already existed within my conception of the outside world for years, posing a challenge to my usual phenomenal conservatism, which basically says that the way things seem to be is a valid a priori reason to hold a belief to be true. The world really did seem to me to have some actors in it that just did not seem to think, or change their minds, or experience things. I don’t think this is the typical first supposition for a child, but I also don’t think it’s a super uncommon one. Christian gnostics sometimes approximate their worldview as “I am the Demiurge’s sole plaything and everything in this world is part of his game, nothing more”, and that pretty rapidly moves you to the lonelier side of solipsistic thinking too.)

So I have settled on the view that the entire class of proposed tests is inadequate, not unfinished, but inadequate in kind. The knowledge argument and its long literature circle the same shower drain. There is something about experience that does not appear in the third-person account, the only kind of account that admits of scientific instrumentation.

I live then in an un-mirror. I have only one direct data point about qualia in the universe, unrepeatable, unshareable, unavailable for peer review. Everything I suspect about who else might “be home” then can only be hearsay, a probabilistic guess based on some perceived resemblance to that singleton.

This matters, because only beings which experience qualia are worthy of moral patienthood.¹ That statement is obvious enough to me to be stated as a brute fact. We don’t need to be full on moral realists to see why this might matter to us. It suffices to be agnostic about moral nihilism.²

As I have put it before on Hacker News:

The only “real” evidence of qualia you have is your own running stream of it; you can try to carefully pour yourself, like a jug of water, into the body of another, and if you go carefully enough you may even succeed to carry that qualia-stream with you. But it’s also possible that you pour too quickly, or that you get bumped in the middle of the pouring, and poof - the qualia is just gone. You’re left with a p-zombie.

Or maybe not. Maybe it comes right back as soon as the transfer is done, like the final piece of a torrented movie. The important part is you won’t know unless you try - and past success never guarantees future success. Maybe you just got lucky on the first pour.

But it gets harder! You can tell a complete functional story about a person (nociception, aversion, learning, planning, self-modeling, report) and at no point does the story require that any of it be like something. So there’s not even a good explanation for why the one data point we have does exist! We experience things in a universe that has no apparent need for the experiencing. We can’t even rule out that qualia might be a simple accident. Heck, I could wake up tomorrow and be a p-zombie for no apparent reason and the world could continue going on exactly the same as it always has been. Very frustrating!

The floor is soft for what we can do in the wake of such uncertainty. But people, especially people of a scientific bent, love to file the “unverifiable”" under “unworkable” and stop. Those are different things. I cannot verify that you are conscious. I cannot verify that a language model is not. What I can do is notice that this soft floor on which I tread, the intuitive heirarchy of presuppositions about what is and is not likelier to be a p-zombie, is not flat. Some candidates resemble the singleton more than others, in more ways, closer or farther whenever we try to pin down specifics. Let’s see what we can do with that.