Can You Prove Consciousness Is Real? — Ali Shukri Amin
First published on my writing site: www.aliamin.info/2025/12/can-you-prove-consciousness-is-real/
By Ali Shukri Amin. I first wrote this as comments on r/PhilosophyMemes, in the thread “The hard problem of actually reading a book”, copied here as written.
Comment 1
How can you be certain perceptual patterns are repeating and they aren’t the product of an evil demon or Boltzmann scenario where the repetitions are hallucinated? Furthermore what makes the repetitions impart true knowledge and what guarantees their continuation into the future? Couldn’t any or all of these patterns run their course and cease to provide the same experience?
Ultimately reliability is predicated on perception, I have to cede that, but if we ground it in a perceptual core instead of the noumenon at least theoretically we have no way to evaluate the reliability of that perception outside of itself (even if this third person is an abstraction for our purposes here)
Posted December 25, 2025. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 2
In philosophy, a noumenon (/ˈnuːmənɒn/, /ˈnaʊ-/; from Ancient Greek: νοούμενoν; pl.: noumena) is knowledge[1] posited as an object that exists independently of human sense.[2] The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses. Immanuel Kant first developed the notion of the noumenon as part of his transcendental idealism, suggesting that while we know the noumenal world to exist because human sensibility is merely receptive, it is not itself sensible and must therefore remain otherwise unknowable to us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon
Your experience of you touching on a screen is not itself evidence. It is an experience. You must then prove to yourself that it is actually happening and then find a way to prove to me that it is happening and that all of the experiences every individual is happening are all also reliable. Just because it’s intuitive or seems to make sense to you doesn’t make it true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism
Posted December 26, 2025. Read it on Reddit.
Comment 3
Walking outside and being able to touch grass does not prove that your consciousness is real or that mine is real, just that something has some experience.
I believe you’re a real person with an internal world, but I don’t believe materialism can ever prove that.
You’re getting frustrated. My question is very simple. How can you, as a materialist, prove that anything outside of the experiences you witness exist? How can you prove, using only material and naturalistic explanations, that:
- Your senses are reliable
- You are truly experiencing an external world
- Other people have inner worlds similar to yours
- Their perception is similar to yours
- You are interacting with these people
If you cannot do that, your philosophy (materialism) is less valid than solipsism – which we both agree is not thr case.
Posted December 29, 2025. Read it on Reddit.
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