Chinese beetle consciousness ...

I'm not sure if this is even a partly original metaphor ...

Suppose you are in a prison, in solitary confinement. You are entirely restricted to a cell with no access to the outside world except for a window you can look out of, and a small hole through which you can send and receive messages to and from other prisoners.

No one lives outside the prison.

Suppose you look out your window and see a tree, and send a message to other prisoners asking them what they see outside their windows. Some say 'a tree' and some say 'nothing'.

You might imagine that some of the prisoners look out the same side of the prison as you do - where the tree stands - and others look out the other side - where this is no tree. But you might also imagine many other possibilities consistent with the answers that you have received.

You might ask further questions to choose between these possibilities.

What if you ask other prisoners where they live, and they all answer 'a cell'. What would this mean? Is 'a cell' the same kind of place that you live, or is it just a name for the place that a prisoner lives?

What questions could you ask that would help you to answer these questions? What if different prisoners' cells were different in some respects, but were still called 'cells'? How different could they be?

What if there were no prisoners, but only computers, scanners, and printers on the other sides of the holes in the walls?

Some speculations can be checked with other prisoners, and some cannot - can only be entertained in the conversation we are having now, and not in any conversation that would be possibly among the prisoners. (If you send a message saying 'are you computer?' and get the answer 'no', would you know more than you did before you asked?)

We should not be deceived, though, by the possibilities which we can entertain in our present conversation, nor into believing that we can intelligibly speculate - within it - on certain of its constraints.

I might ask you where you live, and you might (reassuringly) say 'here, in my consciousness ...'