toulsson

Put a 100 marbles in a jar, 14 blue marbles to represent the population of the West, and 86 red marbles to represent everyone else. If you draw a marble, blindly and at random, from the jar, you have a 14% chance of drawing a blue marble. This how @justalexoki sees the moment of conception. He thinks he is a random generic soul, fresh from the Well of Random Generic Souls, drawing a marble from the jar. 14% blue, 86% red. But you don't draw the marble. You are the marble. A blue marble only has a 14% chance of being selection in a random draw. But, in or out of the jar, a blue marble has a 100% chance of being blue. This is the Seagull Test, which is an inversion of the Breakfast Test. The Breakfast Test requires you to describe a hypothetical timeline where you skipped breakfast this morning, to prove you can imagine hypotheticals. The Seagull Test requires you to reject the question "What if you were a seagull?" as a nonsense question, to prove that you understand the difference between valid and nonsense hypotheticals. You can skip breakfast and still be you, but there is no version of you that can be a seagull, and no seagull that can, in any meaningful way, be you. To pass the Seagull Test, you must reject the question and refuse to answer, or, better yet, reframe the question so that it asks for the intended information in a coherent way, i.e. "What does it feel like to be a seagull?" Which is a very, very different question. I can, with good observational data and some intelligent speculation, possibly understand the thoughts and feelings of a Pakistani brick layer. But I cannot be one in any coherently possible universe, because I am, by definition, me. A blue marble.

@bitcloud Unlike a human brain, where depolarization brings a neuron's membrane potential to a specific threshold, and then the mystical pixie fairies bless the electrochemical reaction with the magical human spark of amazingness that only biology can muster.