The question is why accept an analogy made from a single case. After all, there could be so many causes for other people to be walking lumps of flesh, rather than claiming that consciousness is the cause of that. That is, why claim that this particular feature is the one shared by everyone?

Moreover, the Rabbi admits that even free choice operates only indirectly (through creating a new circuit in the brain that causes the action), while the brain alone is capable of carrying out most different actions unless free choice intervenes. If so, when we see a person, we have no reason to assume the whole metaphysical essence behind him. It is enough to assume that behind him there is a material brain, and that’s it.

I didn’t understand exactly what you meant in the last line…. Did you mean that according to your view, one sees the soul of the other in a metaphysical way—just as the eyes see, for example, the body, so the mind sees his soul?

An analogy is not an exact science, so you can raise questions about analogies made from five or ten cases too. In the absence of contrary data, we make analogies. Those around me tell me that their feelings are like mine, so I have no reason whatsoever to assume that they are creatures of a different type.
The focus of the problem of other minds is not free choice but the existence of a mental dimension. Choice too is part of that.

What I mean is that we have the ability to see things through the senses (and not by means of them). This explains many intuitions we have, including the intuition responsible for analogies and inductions. I elaborated on this in my books Truth and Unstable and in the Quartet.

When the appearance of some factor repeats itself many times, we have reason to assume that there is a connection between that appearance and the objects. For example, the green color of frogs. By contrast, if we see one frog in some location, there is no reason to think there is a connection between the location and the frog. And so here too: when I encounter a certain property only once, how can I even begin to think that this property is significant to the object? And that it will recur in its other appearances?

Therefore I wanted to get to free choice, which describes the fact that the property of consciousness is not passive but is what causes movement. So there is a causal connection between it and movement. That would then allow an analogy to be formed. Because the whole reason one would want an analogy to be based on many appearances is to check whether the property is a factor that has a connection / is “significant” to the general object. And so above at length I tried to explain why one cannot use this property in our own case and infer from it that another person also has choice and therefore consciousness. (I’m aware that the problem of other minds is not choice but consciousness.)

Yes, I’ve heard of the Rabbi’s approach, although I don’t remember whether you claim that the analogy is based on causality or simply on recognition of the general idea.

Naturally I can’t answer for the Rabbi, but as far as I’m concerned this is not a matter of analogy. It’s a matter of explanatory economy.

No, you cannot *prove* that what drives other people is the same thing that drives you, or even that it is something similar. But by proposing two completely different explanations for similar behavior, you are proposing a more complicated explanation, one that requires more entities unnecessarily.

When you talk about your experiences, presumably you’ve noticed that this is because you really do have experiences and want to talk about them. And the behavior of others is the same: if someone cries out and you ask why, he might say something like, “I banged my toe and it really hurts!” Now, it is logically *possible* that when you cry this out it is because you are in pain, whereas when your neighbor cries this out, it is because of some entirely different mechanism that causes him to talk about thoughts and feelings and desires even though he has none. But just because something is logically possible doesn’t mean it is reasonable. The more complicated explanation is the less plausible one here, because there is no need for it—it explains nothing additional, and is only a product of the limits of our knowledge and our uncertainty. The simplest and most plausible explanation is that what drives you is what drives others, and what you experience is what other people experience, more or less.

Of course, none of this confirms or refutes the ideas about consciousness somehow being different from matter, and it could just as well be a product of matter (as I think, for example). But whether that is the case or not, the simpler and more plausible explanation is that other people also have consciousness.

I disagree that Occam’s razor applies here. That’s why I gave the example of free choice, in order to explain this. You claim that the mechanism we know is that consciousness is what drives people to perform actions. But that is exactly what I argued is not the case.
A. If this is not a matter of free choice, then what drives the person is matter, in the sense of Spinoza’s stone.
And therefore your whole claim that consciousness/”feelings” drive actions is nonsense. If anything, the feelings get messed up as a result of the actions.
B. If it is a matter of free choice, then that’s why I gave the Rabbi’s explanation of how choice works. Choice is not the sole driver of the person; rather, it exists within a very specific range. That is, it only has the power to divert the brain from carrying out the action or to affirm that it should carry it out. But this is a kind of indirect causation. At least that’s how I understood the Rabbi from the parable of the little ball and the slope that he presents in his book.
Therefore, in another person’s case, there is no reason to assume that this is a matter of choice. Because I also agree that without free choice, my body would still be able to perform most actions, like an autopilot. So when I see someone, adding free choice to him is a complex explanation. (By contrast, if choice were the direct driver of movements, then there really would be a possibility of making an analogy based on the principle of causality plus Occam’s razor.) And all the more so if you are not basing yourself on choice but on the existence of consciousness (in the sense of Spinoza’s stone). Then this is not a successful analogy at all, because it is based on a single case. As I explained above.)

I think the concept of free choice usually suffers from severe conceptual confusion, and it is usually hard to point to anything the concept even refers to. I could write a great deal on the subject, and probably better not to.

I’ll only say that for this issue it makes no difference at all whether consciousness is a direct causal factor in behavior, or whether it is causally connected only indirectly. For example, consciousness could be compared to a computer screen: what is displayed on it is not what causes the computer’s actions; and still, it would not be wrong to say, “I selected the file and dragged it into the folder,” even though that is not at all what is happening inside the computer itself but only what is happening on the screen. And even if no screen at all were connected to the computer, it would still be possible to send the computer the same input and get the same result.

Similarly, it may be that all our actions are determined by a choosing mechanism that is itself prior to consciousness, and consciousness is only a reflection of all those things. In such a situation consciousness itself is not a direct causal factor in behavior. But so what? It is still causally derived from that same mechanism that also causes behavior, and therefore again it is simpler to assume that for other people too, that same mechanism produces the same results—including consciousness.

I think your example of the computer and the computer screen is a good one. I just don’t understand why you claim this isn’t an analogy. To me it looks like an analogy like any other, and the problem is that it is made on the basis of a single case.
According to your view, if a person sees sealed bottles around him in the street all day, all looking basically the same,
once he opens one bottle and discovers that it contains raspberry juice. From that, according to your view, he would decide that all these bottles contain raspberry juice. Clearly that claim has some degree of probability, but a very low one. Are you willing to place such significant trust in such an analogy? Surely that sounds ridiculous.