Let me start by declaring my motivation for writing about a topic I have no explicit authority on. I’ve been writing for years by now, both on topics I work on with my companies, as well as topics that simply interest me. I find, personally, that writing is a powerful form of learning through synthesis. It’s easy to say you understand something until you have to explain it to someone else. It’s relatively easy to explain something in an elevator pitch format, but a lecture or blog post requires you to really think through structure, validity, and consistency. It forces you to find references to support your claims. Basically, it’s a great way to ensure you’re not fooling yourself through a series of simplifications and delusions. So I’m doing this more for me than you, but you can come along for the ride.

So, let’s talk about the C-word. Consciousness.

We all have rare moments in our life when we stop and ponder a big question. Is my blue the same as your blue? Why is the sky blue? Are there aliens out there? Is there an afterlife? What came before the big bang? What’s the end of the universe? What’s the meaning of it all?

Of course, some of these, science can answer. The sky is blue for the same reason oceans are blue, it is the shortest wavelength light we can still see with our eyes, and therefore scatters from particles in water and air over great distances and gradually dominates the other colors. Some questions we don’t have answers for yet. Some questions we probably never will.

While it’s easy to get caught up in our own minds and worlds, it can be helpful to take a step back and think about simple cases as sources for fundamental truth.

Have you ever… stopped to think about what it’s like to be a bat?

Not in the sense of flying per se, but in that do they even have an inner experience like we do? If there was such a thing as reincarnation, and you became a bat, are the lights still on? Do you have thoughts? A sense of self? What does sonar feel like compared to sight or sound? To clarify, the only reason I chose bats, is that it was the topic of a famous 1974 essay by Thomas Nagel of consciousness — one of the great remaining mysteries of science.

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