> I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.

The materialist(?) view that consciousness is entirely contained within the "material things" seems pretty clean and consistent. If you're experiencing consciousness, and I seem to be experiencing consciousness, and our brains - to the best we can tell - are essentially the same "sufficiently complicated automatons", then you can assume I'm experiencing consciousness too.

The problem with that view is that it assumes consciousness is correlated with mind. It may seem reasonable that, since I have consciousness and a mind, and you have a mind, I can assume you have consciousness, but there is no way to prove this. Does someone with Down Syndrome, who has a less functional mind than you or I, correspondingly have less consciousness? Perhaps, but we have no way of knowing.

I think this is a good point. It's not popular in the ultra-secular tech world, but materialism is not necessarily the only explanation of consciousness, there is very serious non-materialist philosophy. Personally I think Materialism is incoherent -- Daniel Dennett is sort of its logical extension: he argues that consciousness is a myth, a "folk psychology" that doesn't exist, since only material things exist. So we falsely believe that we are conscious. This seems patently absurd to me, but I'm not sure what the right answer is.