What is it like to be a crab?

A few years ago I thought that NDEs basically were that they saw a light and felt a bit relaxed perhaps. Some facts, without an attempt at explaining them: The experience is very similar between experiencers and involve numerous distinct steps, and while some people only have a few of the steps, they seem to be largely the same. The step where someone experiences things from another person’s perspective, or in some cases animal’s, is the “life review”. Positive and negative interactions from the (nearly) dying person’s life is replayed and experienced from their own as well as other involved persons’ (or much more rarely, animals’) perspective. These are also relived somewhat in parallell, a common description is that they are “outside time” or that “it’s not in linear time” (Which btw is very similar to what a lot of John E Mack’s abduction clients told him about their abduction experience. Similar brain mechanisms, or similar actual event perhaps.)

NDEs are not uncommon either, estimates are in the hundred of thousands to millions.

So, now if these experiences are actually what was experienced by the other party, it might indicate that qualia are the same for everyone, your red is my red, and so on (Why is it always red?).

Another interesting thing from NDEs is the first step (so before life review mentioned above), which is an out of body experience. A significant percentage report seeing their surrounding, into neighboring rooms at the hospital, and all sides of objects at the same time, as well as 360 degrees around in all directions. Even more interesting is that a majority of blind people in the survey I read, had been able to see, and there are instances where people blind from birth could say which people in the operating room wore the same color clothes, even though they could not name the color. (Also, at another step than the two mentioned here, a large percentage of seeing report percieving new colors that they have not previously seen).

So this is about 2% of the strange things with NDEs, I would probably dismiss it if it wasn’t for the richness (often years of experiences, although time is a difficult concept in NDEs, uniformity and not uncommonly, information gained during them that the experiencer could not have known. Basically I ended up just feeling desperate hanging on to a materialistic world view.

So there are many mentions about a nerve system, or neurons or other things as a basis for consciousness, but we must explain that many NDEs happen on an operating table with no oxygen supply to the brain, sometimes for hours, and to people with almost no brain tissue left.

I won’t try to convince anyone, because I know I could not have convinced 20-30 year old myself of this even if I could convince “him” that I was himself from the future :) And that doesn’t mean I am right either, of course.

As a footnote, experiencing things from other people’s perspective isn’t limited to NDEs, Federico Faggin, the designer of the Intel 4004, describes one that happened to him in traffic. He also has some interesting metaphysical view, that seem to originate in revelations, rather than the kind of reasoning (if you allow me to use that word) here, but are very compatible with (to skip to the conclusion) the idea that consciousness might be fundamental, and spacetime not.

I get why kids ask this. I don't get why adults ask this. If you have normal color vision and don't have a tumor in your visual cortex your red is as close to my red as the red subpixels are on two units of the same television. Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware.

I can't know for sure but I also don't believe that if a living being is assessed to be less intelligent, that it feels less or is in some way less conscious.

I guess this all speaks to a troubling line of thought that justifies treating other beings as lesser for being less intelligent. Be kind to each other, and the bats, and the crabs, then let's talk about consciousness.

Personally, I agree with Joscha Bach who says consciousness is part of the simulation that the brain needs to do in order to model the world and the needs of the body. So any organism that has a simulation of the external world is probably conscious. Crabs would certainly have one, even if it's a very simple model. They probably also have a self-model, but no self-consciousness of that model like in mammals.

My guess is that although we don't know what it's like to be a crab, we might have an idea of what it's like to be a non-human mammal, even a bat. I think when we are infants (1-3 yrs old?) we have this kind of limited consciousness, which lacks self-awareness but we still have experience and emotions. From the computationalist perspective (i.e. Joscha Bach), this makes sense because our world simulation is still being "built", and for non-human mammals like chimps, this could be their computational limit.