The big idea: You know YOU are conscious — you feel your own pain. But look at the person next to you.
What you never see: You see their face, their tears, their words. What you never, ever see is their inner feel. So here's the unsettling question: how do you actually know anyone else is conscious at all?
This is the problem of other minds. You have direct access to exactly one mind — your own. Everyone else, you know only from the outside: their behaviour, never their experience.
Hold onto this: The problem isn't that other people SEEM like robots. It's that all your evidence for their minds is behaviour — and behaviour is the outside, not the inside feel.
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The standard answer says: reason by comparison with the one case you know from the inside — yourself.
The argument from analogy: It works like this, in two steps.
The argument, step by step
In my own case
When I stub my toe I feel pain, and then I wince and shout. So in me, that behaviour goes with an inner feel.
In your case
Now I see you stub your toe, wince and shout. You're built like me and behave like me.
By analogy
So — by analogy — you probably have the same inner feel I do.
In me, behaviour goes with a feel — so in you too
The justification: That's how I justify believing you're conscious: you're relevantly like the one case I know from inside.
Checkpoint — analogy: In one line: I know pain-plus-behaviour go together in ME, and you're like me, so you probably feel it too. Now for the doubt that bites this argument.
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The sceptic points out how thin the analogy really is.
The sceptic's worry: Every scientific rule you trust rests on many checked cases. But here you have exactly one case where you know that behaviour and feeling go together — your own. Generalising from a single example is exactly the kind of leap we'd distrust anywhere else.
The zombie test
So imagine a philosophical zombie — someone who winces and shouts with nothing going on inside. If that's even possible, then behaviour never guarantees an inner feel. You can't rule it out from the outside — and that's the sceptic's point.
Go further — higher-level insight: A strong reply flips the burden: doubting all other minds is possible in theory but impossible to live — you can't really treat your friends as maybe-mindless. Some philosophers argue that seeing others as conscious isn't a shaky guess at all but built into how we perceive people. Using that move against the sceptic is a top-band step.