Are they real? Or just robots? 🤖 How philosophy tackles the ‘problem of other minds’

Have you ever looked at a friend laughing at a joke, or a stranger on the bus staring blankly out the window, and wondered what’s really going on in their head? You see their smiles and their frowns, you hear their words, but how can you be absolutely certain that they have a rich inner world of thoughts, feelings, and experiences just like you do? This isn’t just late-night paranoia; it’s one of philosophy’s most enduring puzzles: the ‘problem of other minds’. You know you have a mind, but everyone else could, in theory, just be an incredibly sophisticated robot going through the motions. This article will dive into this fascinating problem, exploring how we justify our belief in other minds and why this old question is more relevant than ever in the age of artificial intelligence.

What exactly is the problem?

At its heart, the problem of other minds is a problem of evidence. You have direct, first-person access to exactly one mind in the entire universe: your own. You experience your own thoughts, your feeling of joy when you hear good news, the specific sting of a papercut, or the subjective taste of chocolate. Philosophers call these subjective, qualitative experiences ‘qualia’. You don’t need to infer that you are conscious; you experience it directly.

But for every other person, you only have indirect, third-person evidence. You can observe their behavior, listen to their words, and even scan their brain activity. But you can never directly access their subjective experience. You are forever locked inside your own conscious perspective, looking out at the world. The extreme skeptical position this leads to is called solipsism—the belief that only your own mind is sure to exist. While few people are actually solipsists, the puzzle forces us to ask: on what logical grounds do we reject it?

The common sense answer: The argument from analogy

Most of us don’t spend our days worried that our loved ones are mindless automata. Why? Because we intuitively use what philosophers call the argument from analogy. It’s a simple, common-sense line of reasoning that goes something like this:

• Premise 1: I have a mind, and I know that certain mental states (like being in pain) cause me to produce certain behaviors (like wincing or saying “ouch”).
• Premise 2: I observe other people, who have bodies very similar to mine, exhibiting those same behaviors in similar situations.
• Conclusion: Therefore, it is highly probable that their behavior is caused by the same kind of mental states that I experience. In other words, they have minds too.

This argument feels satisfying because it’s practical and mirrors how we navigate the social world. We see a friend crying and infer they are sad because that’s what we would do if we were sad. The problem, however, is that it’s an induction from a single case—your own. Is it logically sound to generalize the workings of every human mind based on just one example? It gives us a probability, not a certainty, and some philosophers argue it’s a fairly weak one.

The ultimate challenge: The philosophical zombie

To really test the limits of the argument from analogy, philosophers came up with a chilling thought experiment: the philosophical zombie, or ‘p-zombie’. A p-zombie is a hypothetical being that is physically and behaviorally identical to a conscious human in every way. It laughs at jokes, cries at sad movies, discusses philosophy, and can tell you in vivid detail what it’s like to taste a strawberry. The only difference? It has no inner experience. There is no qualia. Inside, it’s all dark. There’s “no one home.”

The p-zombie is a direct challenge to the idea that behavior is proof of consciousness. If you could have a conversation with a p-zombie, you would have no way of knowing it wasn’t conscious. It would pass every behavioral test you could think of. The mere possibility that such a being could exist suggests that behavior and consciousness are not inextricably linked. This is where the line between humans and advanced AI becomes incredibly blurry. Could a sophisticated chatbot that claims to have feelings just be a high-tech philosophical zombie?

Beyond analogy: Best explanations and the AI test

If the argument from analogy is weak and p-zombies are conceivable, how else can we justify our belief in other minds? One powerful alternative is the inference to the best explanation. This argument states that the existence of other minds is simply the best, simplest, and most powerful explanation for the complex, goal-directed, and creative behavior we see in other people. The idea that everyone around you is a mindless robot is a far more complicated and less explanatory theory than the idea that they have minds that drive their actions.

This brings us to the modern era and the famous Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing. In the test, a human judge converses with both a human and a machine. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed the test. While Turing designed this as a test for intelligence, not consciousness, it highlights our core dilemma. We are stuck judging others—whether human or AI—based on external performance. Even if a machine passes the Turing Test, the problem of other minds reminds us that we can’t be sure if we’re talking to a conscious being or a very convincing philosophical zombie.

Conclusion: An unsolved but vital question

The problem of other minds leaves us without a knockout proof for the existence of consciousness outside of ourselves. We began by questioning how we know others are real, explored the intuitive ‘argument from analogy,’ and saw how it was challenged by the unsettling concept of the ‘philosophical zombie.’ We are ultimately trapped within our own subjective experience, relying on inference and probability to understand others. While philosophy doesn’t hand us a neat and tidy answer, it provides us with invaluable tools for thinking about this deep mystery. In a world where artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly sophisticated and human-like, this is no longer just an abstract puzzle. It’s a pressing question that shapes how we’ll interact with and understand the new, non-biological “minds” we are creating.

Image by: Tara Winstead
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