Consciousness

"Our concepts of experience are highly open ended. Because of the fundamentally bounded nature of p-consciousness, we cannot peer directly into other qualitative fields. We must, for instance, allow that a manta ray sensing electromagnetic radiation might have corresponding experiences that are completely foreign to us, just as a blind man must allow that those who can see have experiences that are completely foreign to him. Accordingly, we must allow that simpler and simpler beings might have more and more primitive forms of experience. As we move down this scale, there is no clear boundary at which point we are definitively forced to stop attributing experience. Our confidence may grow weaker for systems that increasingly do not resemble us, but weak confidence for a proposition does not amount to clear logical grounds for rejecting it outright."