View source for The Hard Problem of Unconsciousness

The yinrih are incapable of fully losing consciousness, even during torpor or when in suspension. It is impossible to break a yinrih's stream of consciousness without causing brain death. Fortunately, it's REALLY hard to do this, thanks in part to the yinrih's heavily redundant neurology.

Naturally, this has a huge effect on the yinrih's theory of mind. While it's entirely possible some animals on yih experience unconsciousness as Earth animals do, the yinrih can't possibly know this due to the subjective nature of personal experience.

When they meet humans, who, as you know, lose consciousness for 8 hours every night, a huge debate erupts around the implications. Is the person who wakes up in the morning the same person that went to sleep last night?

This only adds to the yinrih's perception that humans got the short end of the stick, adding the fact that we spend a third of our lives unconscious to the facts that we live so much shorter lives, and we had to invent writing rather than having it built in from the start.


[[Category:Humans]] [[Category:Megathread Uploads]]