What is it like to be?

The problem that we encounter when thinking about whether a living creature has consciousness or not, comes from our predisposition to label whether the creature is sentient. For example, dog owners have no doubt that dogs are sentient and conscious. At the same time many including religious devotees believe that animals do not have “soul”, being mere biological devices. To my opinion the concept of sentience is a fallacy. Umwelt creates such a unique self-awareness experience, that it is impossible to make an abstraction out of it and to translate it into another creature’s mind. We can imagine being another person, being an ape, or even a bat [“What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”]. It is much more difficult to imagine being an ant or a cell in your body because behaviour of simpler organisms follow strict rules to greater extent than ours. They possess less “free will”. But imagining being another living being is not a change of umwelten, it is rather taking your exact umwelt into another body. The next time you wonder what that thing feels looking at the world, you won’t know. It tries, as any other God’s creature, to find its own harmony between what it can do and what the world can do with it.

Intelligent design 2

If human had been created by intelligent design, we would definitely have wheels, and probably a power plug.