On the stature of human consciousness.

On the stature of human consciousness.  Human consciousness is not that special.  It’s not that, compared to other consciousnesses, say the consciousness of a bat, or a pig, or a whale or dolphin, the human being comes up short; it is precisely because we cannot compare our consciousness to other consciousnesses, because when we look at them we look dumbly, without any sense of what lies behind their fur or the rubber of their skin, what’s going on in that cranium of theirs, that the human being shouldn’t think too highly of itself.  It would be something if, as easily as we are able to open a book or peer inside the layers of the ground beneath our feet, we were able to catch a glimpse, or more than a glimpse, of other creatures’ thoughts and emotions.  Perhaps we are approaching this capability with advances in neuroscience and ethology?  Perhaps after eons of being locked up in our own world, a human world, we will at last open ourselves up to the worlds around us, and we may practice a more–deserved presumption.  Until then, modesty is the best policy, the only way in which we may approach the terror and mystery, the abundant questionability, of the world with any honesty.