Re:An extrasolar world covered in water?
by freedomben on Thursday September 01, 2022 @02:47PM
(#32681144)
Yes, exactly, that's the point I'm getting at. We experience "life" through our senses, and our senses can be fooled. Even measuring brain activity requires a subjective level of "trust" that we're seeing a real machine that's taking real measurements, rather than a simulation of a machine. We can look for glitches in the matrix, but absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
It's wildly impractical to live your life like that, but at the end of the day we just don't know and probably can't know.
Isn't every subjective experience, almost by definition, unable to be tested scientifically?
We can objectively measure someone's brain activity during sleep, but we can't really measure their subjective experience. Implying that everything made up of subjective experience (like consciousness) can't be measured. Which also implies it can't be proven by scientific means. So in response to the GP comment, I'm not sure we can "know you're awake" (in the scientific sense, at least).