So the Cogito paradox made itself known to us in bitistics in an ironic and at the same time startling manner: as despair on the part of machines as to whether people really think! The situation suddenly acquired a perfect bilateral symmetry. We humans are unable to achieve complete certainty (as a proof) as to whether a machine thinks and, in thinking, experiences its states as mental ones—since conceivably one may be dealing with nothing more than an externally perfect simulation whose internal correlative is a kind of void of total “soullessness.” For their part, machines are similarly unable to obtain proof of whether we, as their partners, think consciously—as they do. Neither side knows what experiential states the other subsumes under the label “consciousness.”