The afternoon sun had found its way through the tall windows of the Senior Common Room, illuminating a cloud of dust that seemed to have been in thoughtful suspension since the Edwardian era.
Professor Quillibrace was studying a monograph entitled Comparative Consciousness and Non-Human Cognition. Miss Elowen Stray sat opposite, making notes in the margin of a well-thumbed notebook.
Mr Blottisham entered with unusual confidence.
"I've decided," he announced, "that the whole debate has become unnecessarily complicated."
Quillibrace continued reading.
"A diagnosis frequently made by those proposing to simplify it."
Blottisham ignored this.
"We already know what consciousness is."
Quillibrace lowered his book.
"Do we?"
"Certainly."
"Excellent."
He closed the volume.
"Describe it."
Blottisham looked surprised.
"Well..."
"Yes?"
"It looks rather like us."
Quillibrace smiled faintly.
"That," he said, "is precisely the difficulty."
"I don't follow."
"I asked what consciousness is."
"And I told you."
"No."
"You asked what it looks like."
"And you described what humans look like."
Miss Stray looked up from her notebook.
"They are not necessarily the same thing."
Blottisham folded his arms.
"Surely consciousness has bodies."
"Human consciousness does."
"It has emotions."
"Again..."
"It has memories."
"Indeed."
"It has a continuous sense of self."
Quillibrace nodded politely.
"You have assembled an admirable catalogue."
"Thank you."
"Of human characteristics."
Blottisham frowned.
"What else could consciousness possibly have?"
Miss Stray answered gently.
"Perhaps things we have never imagined."
There was a brief silence.
Blottisham broke it.
"You're suggesting consciousness might not resemble us?"
"I'm suggesting," said Quillibrace, "that we have only ever examined one branch of a very large tree."
Miss Stray closed her notebook.
"Think about whales."
"They're damp."
"They experience the world primarily through sound."
"Bats."
"They navigate by echo."
"Octopuses."
"They appear to treat their own arms with an independence many committees would admire."
Blottisham laughed.
"They're all conscious?"
"We do not know with certainty."
"But if they are," said Miss Stray, "their experience is already profoundly unlike ours."
Quillibrace leaned back.
"The interesting question is whether those differences are variations within consciousness..."
"...or evidence against it."
Blottisham nodded.
"I'd never thought of that."
"Few people do."
"It reminds me," said Miss Stray, "of how people once imagined the Earth occupied the centre of the universe."
"What has astronomy got to do with consciousness?"
"The habit is the same."
"We mistake our point of view for the natural centre of reality."
Blottisham considered this.
"So perhaps we're doing the same thing with minds."
"Exactly."
Quillibrace reached for the biscuit tin.
"If an alien civilisation arrived tomorrow..."
"They usually do in these discussions."
"...and if they could discuss mathematics, produce symphonies and debate metaphysics..."
"They'd be rather accomplished."
"...but possessed no recognisable emotions..."
"No emotions?"
"None that resembled ours."
"No smiling?"
"No."
"No embarrassment?"
"No."
"No childhood memories?"
"No."
"No concept of individuals?"
Blottisham looked uneasy.
"That hardly sounds like a mind."
Quillibrace selected a biscuit.
"How interesting."
"Interesting?"
"You did not ask whether they experienced the world."
"I assumed they did."
"You asked whether they experienced it sufficiently like us."
Miss Stray nodded.
"We often confuse familiarity with evidence."
Blottisham stared into the fire.
"I suppose I do use humanity as the measuring stick."
"As do we all."
"Can we avoid it?"
Quillibrace smiled.
"Only by noticing that we are doing it."
After a moment Miss Stray spoke again.
"There is another version of the same mistake."
"Oh?"
"People often say that consciousness must be biological."
"Naturally."
"Must it?"
"Every conscious thing we've encountered has been biological."
"Quite true."
"So there we are."
Quillibrace shook his head.
"There we are nowhere."
Blottisham sighed.
"I thought that sounded persuasive."
"It sounded empirical."
"It is."
"It begins empirically."
"And then?"
"It quietly changes."
Quillibrace picked up a pencil.
"Observe."
He wrote on a scrap of paper.
All known conscious beings are biological.
He placed the paper on the table.
"A perfectly respectable observation."
Then beneath it he wrote:
Therefore only biological beings can ever be conscious.
"There."
He put the pencil down.
"An entirely different proposition."
Blottisham stared at the two sentences.
"They look almost identical."
"Precisely why people confuse them."
Miss Stray smiled.
"The first describes what we have observed."
"The second describes what reality is permitted to contain."
Blottisham leaned back.
"So biology might merely be one route."
"It might."
"Or the only route."
"Indeed."
"We simply don't know."
The room fell quiet.
Rain began tapping softly against the windows.
Finally Blottisham asked,
"If consciousness isn't defined by looking human..."
"No."
"...and perhaps not even by being biological..."
"Perhaps."
"Then what are we actually looking for?"
Neither of the others answered immediately.
At length Miss Stray spoke.
"I think that is the first honest question we've asked all afternoon."
Quillibrace rose and returned the monograph to its shelf.
"The history of knowledge," he said, "contains a recurring embarrassment."
"What's that?"
"We repeatedly discover that reality is larger than the categories with which we first attempted to describe it."
"The Earth."
"Indeed."
"Life."
"Quite."
"The universe."
"Exactly."
Blottisham looked thoughtfully towards the window.
"And perhaps minds."
Quillibrace smiled.
"Perhaps."
They watched the rain for a while.
Then Miss Stray said quietly,
"If another kind of mind ever appears..."
"Yes?"
"Our greatest difficulty may not be deciding whether it resembles us."
She looked around the room.
"It may be deciding whether we are prepared to stop using ourselves as the measure of everything."
For once, nobody hurried to answer.
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