Theory of Other Minds and P-Zombies

Are your friends really "all there" ?

Do other minds exist? You may think this is obvious: “yes they do!” People around you act just like you, so why wouldn’t they also have a mind like you yourself do?

However, what if I created a robot that also acted like a human? This becomes far more plausible now we have the likes of ChatGPT behaving just like a person. Do these digital algorithms really constitute a mind? If not, then isn’t it also plausible that other humans might also just be acting like they have a mind, but don’t actually have a mind the same way you do?

The belief that other minds exist is called the Theory of Mind.

In response to the question, there are two fundamental positions one can take. The first is that of solipsism: that I am the only actual conscious person. In this situation you know what consciousness is, but you are skeptical that others have their own independent consciousness. Instead they just act like you do, as kind of reflections of your own consciousness.

The other view is that they do indeed have consciousness, and from this we must conclude that consciousness is emergent from physical stuff. I’ll explain why in a moment.

Let’s look at the first option. In this case, there is likely only me. By me, I mean the reality seen from my perspective. Experience. I may see other people appear to be conscious, but that is all just reflections of parts of my own psyche in some form. It doesn’t mean that I am able to control them, as we have already established that dreams can be surprising, thoughts can be surprising, so that means there is always an element of conscious unknown that could manifest in the appearance of “other people” surprising me with their behavior. Consciousness is not knowing or understanding, it is quite separate to it.

The second option is that solipsism isn’t the case. In other words, that these other people are not parts of my own psyche, and are actually conscious independently, having exactly the same phenomenal experience as me. Now if they are actually conscious, then it means that their physical constitution is not part of my own consciousness - it must be separate to it, also. And that means the physical world around me must also be separate to my consciousness, meaning idealism cannot be true (at least, not the traditional understanding of idealism). And if the physical is real, then we have to take it as brute fact that the apparent correlation between that physical constitution and their conscious reports must also be inseparable. I know this simply because of the fact that I encounter other minds through physical movement through spacetime: a person gets taken on a bus and then talks to me. That’s how I am confronted with their consciousness, but for it to appear to me it was first subject to these physical constraints of having to travel, and that means certainly constrained by the physical - even if consciousness is a separate thing, it is anchored to that person’s brain.

Now surely that physical constitution is not created by their own consciousness, because it is observed in my consciousness - if that were the case then their consciousness would be somehow integrated with mine, which doesn’t seem to be possible (where does one consciousness end and another begin?). The only reasonable position to take would be that the physical is actually creating the consciousness.

Now if that is the case, then it would be reasonable to conclude that my physical constitution is also creating my own consciousness. And that would be what we call emergence. It’s often used as the basis of materialism.

And many secularists believe that if you arrange atoms in a certain way, it then magically becomes conscious and has experiences the way I do (you and I?).

There is much to tell us, though, that consciousness is not emergent. We certainly don’t feel as though we are simply moving atoms. So what is the answer? Solipsism is certainly hard to accept, but emergence equally so.

The answer, I feel, is that emergence is true, just not in the way many believe it to be. My gut feeling is that consciousness does emerge from processes, but they must be very specific processes. Very specific.

Is it a matter of complexity? This is something we don’t know, but we can likely find out simply by analyzing how the processing occurs, and seeing what causes it to shut-off from a phenomenal perspective, tested through reporting. I would say that IIT and related disciplines are great areas of research that will help us in this endeavor tremendously.

But it isn’t simply emergent. There is a two-way causation: the matter enables consciousness, but consciousness chooses which of the branches of possible timelines to traverse through. That means consciousness works hand-in-hand with matter, co-dependent. The result is a hybrid of materialism and idealism.

Does this mean that other minds exist and are conscious the same way we are? Is the theory of mind correct?

Yes and no. We must believe that the criteria for consciousness to emerge from matter involves a high bar. There must be configurations that seem very much like they would produce consciousness, but actually do not - because some critical aspect is missing, no matter now small. And it’s likely that in our timelines we come across people who are not conscious because of this but may act conscious. Why? Because perhaps their behavior is inconsistent with their requirements for the continuity of consciousness, but consistent with our own. In this case they may be indistinguishable from a conscious person, but they would not be: effectively they would be a “behavioral-zombie”.

Those that we know best, and whose expectations of behavior are aligned with our own most closely, they would be far more likely to be phenomenally conscious.

Isn’t that strange? But it seems it could be true. Perhaps you have come across people you have questioned whether they were actually “all there”. Some refer half-jokingly to them as NPCs, but it is the same idea: in order for your consciousness to continue, it would require matter to behave a certain way, but that may not coincidence with what is required for them to be phenomenally conscious and have experiences the way you do. They could be just like an LLM, a ChatGPT.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out which of your friends and acquaintances fit into that category.