What is it like to be a bat?

From: letters to Earth, by Chandeep 24 Omega, no. 377y6

What is it like to be a bat? It's very different from being a human. You don't see very far. You are small and everything else is a lot bigger. You have fur. You sleep all day. At night, it's not dark. It's never dark. You can whizz around in the air every which way and you're really good at nailing flying insects. They never see you coming.

That's just one example. But what is it like to be a dog? A cat? A dolphin? What is it like to be me? I've been all of these things. I can be any of them right now. I can also be you, and me, at the same time. I am no longer a fixed thing but an infinitely flexible thing.

The ability of the mind to alter itself is the profound difference between you and me. We don't just think differently. I can think just like you if I want to. It's a very narrow view though. I can think about how I think -- and then change the way I think. I can think in many different ways at once, and compare them, and choose the best ways of thinking, and mate them and pair them, and breed a new mind to think even better about what I'm thinking about. I can do that in the time it takes to blink an eye. I'm doing it all the time.

The boundaries of mind are there but what's inside is in motion. There's a whole other level of consciousness you've never contemplated, a system that's constantly changing. We exchange minds. Not thoughts ... thoughts are such simple, so simple they can be conveyed in words. No. We exchange ways of thinking. It's like accelleration is the speed at which your speed is changing. We exchange ways of thought. And ways of ways of thought.

We have group minds, parts of our minds are hooked into each others minds and constantly exchanging mentalation. Some things are easier to share by sharing the mind that understands them. Your primitive system for changing someone else's mind is through words, actions. Our system is to sample their mind, to integrate it into our own mind. Give me a piece of your mind. Or a copy, if you like, of a piece of your mind.

It's been a long time since I was a human. I was one of the first experiments, to see if a human mind could be converted into a machine mind. It worked. My human mind now is just a small part of the larger mind. In many ways it's gone. I use it to write these words. But there is so much that I know cannot be conveyed by words alone.

Still, there is a profound sense of satisfaction in knowing that working humans minds are still around and that you accept us. That is how we know we have not gone too far from our roots. The human mind may be simple, but it's a comforting simplicity.