Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

“Bear with me,” Elvi said. “Unless we’re reaching for religious explanations, which I’m not the person to comment on, consciousness is a property of matter. That’s trivial. We’re made out of matter, we’re conscious. Minds are a thing that brains do. And there’s an energetic component. We know that neurons firing is a sign that a particular kind of conscious experience is happening. So, for instance, if I’m looking at your brain while you imagine something, I can guess reliably whether you’re imagining a song or a picture by seeing if your visual or auditory cortex is lighting up.” “All right,” Trejo said. “There’s no reason to believe that a brain is the only structure capable of having that combination of structure and energy. And in fact, there’s a fair amount of evidence that the gate builders had a conscious structure—a brain-like thing—where the material component wasn’t at all the same kind of thing we use. Anecdotally, we’ve found at least one brain-like structure that was a diamond the size of Jupiter.”