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forgo travel, to avoid splashing through puddles filled with microbes, whose existence Jains posited well before they appeared under Western microscopes.
For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.
Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases-primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alienseeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life's tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar's lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc's face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.
O ASPECT OF OUR WORLD is as mysterious as consciousness, the state of awareness that animates our every waking moment, the sense of being
located in a body that exists within a larger world of color, sound, and touch, all of it filtered through our thoughts and imbued by emotion.
Even in a secular age, consciousness retains a mystical sheen. It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science's reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world's most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.
These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body's sensory systems
