That’s not a problem. The idea is to define practical categories along the spectrum of consciousness so that they can be discussed without having to re-define terms prior to every discussion. There’s no reason any given organism should or shouldn’t fall into a particular category except for its properties directly regarding that category.

I think the big dividing line between what many animals do and what cells or plants do is the ability to react in different ways by considering stimuli in conjunction with memory, and then the next big divide is metacognition. I feel like there should be concrete words for these categories. “Sentient” and “conscious” have pretty much lost meaning at this point, as demonstrated by this discussion’s existence.

I will call them reactive awareness, decisive awareness, and reflective awareness in the absence of a better idea.

Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self

I don’t know whether this applies to plants and fungi, but it applies to just about every animal. There’s a minimum basic sense of self required in distinguishing one’s own movements from the approach of an attacker. Even earthworms react differently when they touch something vs when something touches them.

They’re the same. The “pika” is from “hika”, which refers to light.

For the books I would personally most like to translate, I think the problem is marketability. Nordic children’s/youth literature often contains nudity/sexuality and/or darker emotional themes which are often viewed as inappropriate in English-speaking cultures.

In “Vi skulle vært løver” by Line Baugstø a young girl discovers her classmate is transgender, and for much of the book participates in transphobia before learning better and supporting her new friend. It’s a very well-told and realistic emotional experience, but would likely be seen as grooming by many English-speaking audiences. Not only does it support trans people, but it also spends quite a lot of time in the girls’ locker room. I think if you tried to give this to kids in the US or UK there’d just be a ton of controversy about it and it’d get banned.

I wonder this all the time. I can’t help but fantasize how I would translate things while reading, but there’s nothing to be done about it if the publisher isn’t interested. They could at least make it legal to distribute fan translations.

Is she a professional liveseamer on Stitch.tv?

Those things pop your ears, yeah, but they’re not what I mean, and they don’t make the noise. Oh well.

I taught myself to do this after reading about it in a short fantasy promo when I was little. An adult asks a boy what he can hear, and he says people talking, so the man instructs him on how to really listen to what is being said around him, to gather information without attracting notice. I’ve always wondered what that story was because I’d like to read the whole thing.

I didn’t realize that’s not a thing everyone can do. There’s a part of All I Want for Christians is You that’s just someone mashing annoyingly on a piano, and it’s so disgusting that I love it. It starts at about 0:58 on the YouTube Music copy, and then changes at about 1:05. It’s such an annoying sound in isolation.

Human skin contains photoreceptors, so this makes perfect sense.

Based on what I’ve read about senses, I think most of human sensory variance is born in the brain and is trainable to be much more sensitive than we’d generally expect possible given our comparatively weak hardware. Some of us have the supertaster gene, but no one comes out of the womb a sommelier.

Can you do that thing where you flex some internal muscle and hear a loud rumbling that I assume is rushing blood? It’s hard to explain. I think the muscle is related to the jaw, or maybe ear movement. It’s not externally perceivable, but it’s useful on an airplane.

You’re projecting onto me things that you’ve observed in other people who are not me.

Yeah, it’s a real tragedy all those cishet white folks getting stuffed in ICE vans and stopped at the borders.

I found cognitive behavioral therapy very helpful and cannot recommend it enough.

I can’t bring myself to be happy about it when it involves a bunch of innocent people suffering.