What the heck is consciousness anyway?

[Andrew P.]

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Nagel recently. In the OA Current era it is fairly commonplace for a human-derived sophont to choose to become something completely different, including a bat (usually but not always a sophont bat, or maybe something even more exotic like a To'ul'h). This implies that there must be procedures, processes and interpretation software available that can convert the mental experience of being a human into the experience of a bat, or a To'ul'h, or any of the other options available in the Terragen Sphere (and vice versa).

I expect that this would be easier if the original modosophont could upload themself, then modify their uploaded consciousness with effective neuro-translation software. The end result would be a human personality that is fully capable of experiencing bat or To'ul'h qualia, whatever that may be like.

It may even be possible to medically transplant a human brain directly into the body of a large animal of some kind, so that even staunch believers in CIT could gain the experience of being that animal (assuming suitable neurotranslation hardware could be manufactured). But there has to be room for a human brain in the host body to retain continuity. So CIT proponents could be implanted into an elephant, or a dolphin, or a whale, but not a mouse.

That's fascinating to think about - what must it entail, to take a baseline human mind (for example), and then port it into a very different body with very different senses? Would it be easiest/ most common to leave the mind itself essentially unchanged, and just wire the new senses into the old mind, translating them into a format that's easy for a baseline human mind to interpret and understand? Or would it be necessary, or somehow easier, to tweak the mind's architecture in such a way as to make it more, say, bat-like? So it would end up thinking like a bat does, to some extent?

I don't think there are any right or wrong answers to the above questions, at least none that we can evaluate right now, but it's fun to think about.