What Is It Like?

Ask what it is like to be a bat, and you run straight into the edge of what language can describe. You can learn everything about echolocation — the frequencies, the neural pathways, the wing muscles — and still not know what the experience of it feels like from the inside.

This is the starting point for thinking about consciousness: the gap between describing a process and having it. A thermostat processes information. So, in a much richer way, does a brain. Somewhere in that richness, for reasons nobody can fully explain, there is also something it is like to be the thing doing the processing.

Not every process seems to come with an "inside." A calculator does not appear to experience adding two numbers, even though it performs the operation faithfully. What separates a calculator from a bat, or a bat from you, is not obviously a matter of complexity alone.

Over the next two chapters, we will look at why this gap is so stubborn, and at the edges of the self where the question gets even stranger. For now, it is enough to notice the gap itself — quietly, without needing to close it.