What the heck is consciousness anyway?

[stevebowers]

... what must it entail, to take a baseline human mind (for example), and then port it into a very different body with very different senses? Would it be easiest/ most common to leave the mind itself essentially unchanged, and just wire the new senses into the old mind, translating them into a format that's easy for a baseline human mind to interpret and understand? Or would it be necessary, or somehow easier, to tweak the mind's architecture in such a way as to make it more, say, bat-like? So it would end up thinking like a bat does, to some extent?

I'd say that in OA, especially in the Current Era but probably for some time before that, both would be possible. A PIT believer could be uploaded, then choose to change their internal mental architecture to conform to that of a bat (perhaps a sophont bat, or perhaps a non-sophont one).

A CIT believer couldn't chop their brain up small enough to fit in a bats' body without destroying part of their mind, but they could teleoperate a bat's body, utilising highly sophisticated mental translation software to change bat perceptions and skills into human ones, while still inhabiting their own human body (probably in some kind of biostasis).

Of course the person teleoperating the bat need not be a human, since OA modosophonts are very diverse; and the person teleoperating the bat might be a PIT believer as well, who prefers not to undergo radical neurotechnological modification. The person temporarily inhabiting this bat's body might even be a xenosophont, an aioid, or an archailect.