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I think we’ve skipped defining terms, which makes it hard to work out exactly what your thought experiment is trying to say.

What does it mean to be conscious? I (layman, this is a well-explored space so maybe somebody more informed will come along with a better definition) would define a conscious being as one which has subjective experiences, that is, one which has has the sensation of thinking. Therefore I know I am a conscious being by definition.

I mean this is just “I think, therefore I am.”

It is definitely possible that I’m an artificial being programmed to have first person subjective experience. I can confirm, if so, to my creators that their experiment was successful. But, I can’t offer any proof, and of course they would be totally reasonable to assume I am lying.

In your thought experiment, you say an entity that thinks it is conscious, but isn’t. By my definition of consciousness, that is impossible, because thinking things is definitionally a characteristic of conscious beings. It is fine if you want to use a different definition of consciousness or thinking, I just assumed and later supplied (my bad, I also should have defined in the beginning) what I thought were typical definitions.




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