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In his 2021 book "Being You", Anil Seth writes:

"There is something it is like to be me, something it is like to be you, and probably something it is like to be a sheep, or a dolphin. ... But there is almost certainly nothing it is like to be a bacterium, a blade of grass, or a toy robot."

I'm not convinced there is any basis for the assertions of the last sentence. Is there?

And what about the Sun?

Daniel Asimov
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    Anil Seth being a neurologist, it's not a far fetched hypothesis that he considers consciousness to be an emergent property of a nervous system. In this perspective a sheep or a dolphin might have consciousness, but not things that don't have a nervous system like bacteria, grass, toys or the sun. – armand Nov 01 '21 at 04:28
  • what about this line of reasoning: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/65495/sum-ergo-cogito/86379#86379 ? – Nikos M. Nov 01 '21 at 07:50

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In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant associates consciousness with the concept of the unity of the self or with the transcendental apperception [1] of the self (sometimes incorrectly referred to as the transcendental subject).

This element is the one that provides the object of consciousness (what is observed) of a quality of unity. It is not something that is mixed with the rest of the world, but clearly bounded. The reference in your text has precisely such sense: "something that is like to be ME" implies that there is something that IS NOT ME, like another one's feelings, or the perception of a rock as non being part of the body.

So, the idea of a unity around the apperception of ME is, probably according to your text, the key factor of the notion of consciousness, which some beings are not capable of, like bacteriae.

When a sheep looks for food, it clearly targets an object (implying NOT targeting what IS NOT THE OBJECT), which does not necessarily correspond the one we would target. E.g. a sheep would normally not bite a rock or its leg when trying to eat, but will do it with grass, so, the sheep clearly discriminates the object food from what is not food.

[1] https://askaphilosopher.org/2012/11/14/explaining-kants-transcendental-unity-of-apperception/

RodolfoAP
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