The Amazing Mind Aquarium: How We All Experience the World Differently!
What if you had your own special aquarium in your head?
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be someone else? Maybe your best friend, your dog, or even a butterfly? It’s one of the biggest mysteries in the whole wide universe!
Imagine if every person and animal is like a fish swimming in their very own special aquarium! We can look through the glass and see other “fish” in their tanks, but we can never actually swim in their water. Isn’t that a super cool way to think about it?
What is consciousness? (That’s a fancy word for being YOU!)
The water in your special aquarium is what philosophers (people who think about big questions) call consciousness. Consciousness is that magical feeling of being YOU, swimming in YOUR water, seeing through YOUR eyes!
Right now, as you read these words, your brain is creating your very own special version of the world. It’s like you have your own pair of special glasses that nobody else can wear!
The Red Question That Makes Brains Go Fizzy
Here’s something that will make your brain do cartwheels: What if what I call “red” looks completely different in your mind? Maybe my red looks like what you would call blue, but we’d never know because we both learned to call that color red, even if we see it differently!
When you see a bright red fire truck, and your friend also sees a bright red fire truck, are you both seeing the exact same thing? We may never know for sure!
Animal Aquariums: Imagine Being Something Else!
Animals have their own special aquariums too – but they’re probably VERY different from ours!
The Eagle’s Super-Vision Aquarium
If you were an eagle soaring high above mountains, your aquarium would have amazing super-vision! Eagles can see four times better than we can. That’s like having super-duper zoom cameras for eyes!
Eagles can spot a tiny rabbit from over a mile away! That’s like being able to see an ant crawling on the ground from across a huge football field! Can you imagine having eyes that powerful?
And here’s something even more incredible – eagles can see colors that humans can’t even imagine! They have special cells in their eyes that can see ultraviolet light. That’s a kind of light that’s completely invisible to us!
The Dolphin’s Sound-Picture Aquarium
Dolphins don’t just see with their eyes like we do – they use SOUND to see! This is called echolocation (echo-low-kay-shun).
They make clicking sounds that bounce off things underwater, and their brains turn those echoes into pictures! Imagine if you could close your eyes and CLICK-CLICK-CLICK with your mouth and suddenly you could “see” everything around you, even behind you!
And get this – dolphins can actually see INSIDE other animals with their sound pictures! They can tell if another dolphin is going to have a baby! That’s like having X-ray vision!
The Big Mystery: How Do We Have Aquariums At All?
Now here’s a super tricky question that makes even grown-up philosophers scratch their heads: How does our brain make feelings and experiences? How does the squishy gray stuff in our heads create a whole world of seeing, hearing, and feeling?
Scientists call this the “hard problem” of consciousness. Our brains are made of billions of tiny cells called neurons, but how do they work together to make the feeling of being YOU?
Try This Consciousness Experiment!
Close your eyes for a moment and think about eating a super sour lemon. Really imagine the sour taste… Is your mouth watering? That’s your brain creating a real feeling just from a thought! That’s consciousness in action!
Do Worms and Plants Have Aquariums Too?
What about a worm? Does it have its own special aquarium? Worms don’t have big brains like us, but they do have nerve cells that help them feel things like heat, cold, and danger. Maybe they have tiny, simple aquariums?
And plants are even more mysterious! They don’t have brains at all, but they can sense light and turn toward it. They can tell when they’re being touched! Could they have some kind of plant consciousness that’s totally different from ours? Some scientists are studying this very question!
What Does It FEEL Like To Be Different Creatures?
If an eagle’s consciousness lets it see super far, and a dolphin’s lets it see with sound… what would it FEEL like to be them? Would an eagle feel proud of its amazing vision?
A famous thinker named Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” His answer was – we can imagine hanging upside down or using sound to see, but we can’t ever really know what it FEELS like in the bat’s aquarium!
That’s because a bat’s whole life – from baby bat to grown-up bat – is built around different senses than ours. Their whole bat-experience is bat-shaped, not human-shaped!
The Consciousness Imagination Game!
Let’s play a game! Think about being different animals – what would be the coolest thing about being in their aquarium?
- If you were a dog, you could smell a billion different smells! Dogs can even smell what happened YESTERDAY in a place!
- If you were a butterfly, you’d have compound eyes that can see in almost all directions at once! Like having hundreds of tiny TVs showing different shows!
- If you were a snake, you could sense heat from warm-blooded animals even in total darkness!
Butterfly Secret Messages
Did you know many butterflies can see ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are completely invisible to us? It’s like secret flower messages meant just for butterflies! The flowers might look totally different in a butterfly’s aquarium than they do in ours.
Human Aquariums Are All Different Too!
Even humans have different aquariums from each other! Your favorite ice cream might taste totally different to your best friend!
People’s brains can work differently too. Some people with autism might experience sounds or touches much more strongly than others. Their aquarium water might feel more intense!
And someone who was born blind has an aquarium without visual pictures, but their touch and hearing might create experiences we can’t even imagine!
Connecting Our Aquariums With Empathy
Even though we can never swim in someone else’s aquarium, we can try really hard to imagine what it might be like to be them. This is called empathy (em-path-ee).
Empathy is like pressing our face against the glass of our aquarium and really LOOKING at the other fish, trying to understand their wiggles and bubbles!
And even though we can never completely know what it’s like in someone else’s mind-aquarium, just trying to understand makes us kinder and more caring!
The Super-Special Human Power
One special power of being human is that we can imagine other aquariums even if we can’t swim in them! We can write stories and make art about how it might feel to be someone or something else!
When you read a book about a talking animal or watch a movie about someone different from you, you’re practicing seeing through other aquariums!
Your Turn To Explore Consciousness!
Here’s a fun experiment you can try: next time you see a pet or a bug or even another person, take a moment to wonder – what might it be like in their aquarium right now?
You could even draw a picture of what you think different consciousness aquariums might look like! A dog aquarium filled with amazing smells, a bat aquarium with sound-pictures, or even your best friend’s aquarium!
Even though we might never solve the big consciousness puzzle completely, just wondering about it makes our own aquariums more colorful and exciting!
Remember – every mind is a wonderful world of its own! Keep thinking, keep wondering, and keep being kind to all the other fish in all the other aquariums!
