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“Consciousness may end up being found in very strange places.”

— Christof Koch

The canonical question in the philosophy of consciousness was posed by Thomas Nagel in 1974: “What is it like to be a bat?”

Nagel’s idea was that consciousness is defined simply by what it feels like to be something — the inner, subjective experience of being alive and aware.

“An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism,” he explained.

Many have found this subjective answer unsatisfyingly circular: What is this…

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