ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZEL
Can you enter the mind of another creature without getting hopelessly lost? After publishing my first metamorphising column, in which I attempted to imagine myself into the head of a bat, a reader aired doubts. Such mental somersaulting was all very well, he wrote, but it was a dead end: I was chasing what it would be like for me to be a bat, “not what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” The challenge is not for us to imagine what it’s like to learn echolocation, for example, but to imagine ourselves as having different forms of consciousness entirely. A more complicated proposition.
Fair enough. Still, the more I think about it, the more certain I am that our starting point must be the study of how our fellow creatures perceive the world; that studying how it looks to them must be the first step in attempting to see it through their eyes. We all exist as solitary bubbles of consciousness against which external objects collide and produce internal, psychological phenomena. Different bodies have evolved to pay attention to different life priorities- and so by careful study of a creature’s sensory capabilities, we might deduce what another creature expends energy on mentally representing. In other words, we might find a way into their minds by considering what they “think” about, using that word loosely, in a less anthropocentric way.
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April 2021
 
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