vocal communication. Indeed, we learn to use language before we understandlanguage, as exemplified by a friend’s 2-year-old grandson who adeptly appliedwords he had heard his parents say and demanded that “someone change myfucking diaper!” We learn to understand language before we learn to questionlanguage. Rarely do we learn to question language itself.

In order to solve this paradox, we need to explain two aspects of consciousness: How there could be natural phenomena that are private and thus independent of physical processes (or how come they seem private), and what the exact relationship between cognitive content and phenomenal consciousness is.

key challenge is to quantify the functional roles of bacterial taxa in nature to understand how the properties of ecosystems change over time or under different environmental conditions

some of the key questions of microbial community assembly, maintenance and function could be answered by intensively studying one (or a few) synthetic model community