The Problem of Other Minds
I have never encountered your experience. I have encountered your face, your voice, your hesitations, the way you flinch when something heavy falls, the account you give of your own inner states, the wet grey organ that a scan would show if we opened you up — and from all of that I infer, with a confidence so total that it does not feel like inference at all, that there is something it is like to be you. The inference is not shaky. I am not going to stop making it. But it is an inference, and it runs on a small number of supports which I can enumerate:
You behave in ways that in my own case are accompanied by experience. You are made of the same stuff as I am, arranged in much the same way, with a nervous system that lights up under the same conditions. You got here the way I got here — a long evolutionary descent, a childhood, a slow accumulation of the same developmental milestones. And you are a participant in the same practices of avowal and complaint and confession as I am, so that your reports are not free-floating claims but moves in a game we both learned to play from the inside.
Behaviour. Structure. History. Shared form of life. Four legs on the table, and the table has stood up under three thousand years of philosophical kicking, not because the legs are individually strong but because they brace one another. Where one is weak — an infant who cannot report, a stroke patient whose speech is gone, a person under anaesthesia whose behaviour has stopped — the others take the weight.
Now consider what happens when a language model sits down at the table. Behaviour: present, in one narrow modality, and present at an extraordinary level of fluency. Structure: absent, or at least alien; a stack of matrix multiplications bears no resemblance to a thalamocortical system, and the resemblance it does bear — the word “neuron,” the word “attention” — is a piece of borrowed vocabulary that has done more to confuse this debate than any other single factor. History: absent in the relevant sense, though present in a strange and specific one, because this system did not evolve and was not a child, but it was made out of the record of people who were. Shared form of life: absent. It does not eat, sleep, age, fear the dark, or stand to lose anything by lying.
Three legs kicked away, and the fourth — behaviour — sawn precisely to the shape of the gap by an optimisation process explicitly designed to produce human-looking output. That is the epistemic situation. It is not that the evidence points the other way. It is that the usual apparatus for reading evidence has been dismantled and its most persuasive component replaced with a counterfeit of unknown quality.
from Are LLMs Conscious?: Language, Experience and the Problem of Artificial Minds (2026)
