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What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

warwick.ac.uk

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Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#21
post #3

What is it like to be a cricket bat?

https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/like...

This kind of retort is a rookie error in the field of philosophy of mind. It clings too closely to notions of 1) self-awareness as an essential component of awareness per se (it's not) and 2) awareness as an essential component of experience per se (it's not).

Edit: I was referring to the link, not the top-level comment. It reads like an attempt at rebuttal from someone relatively unfamiliar with the field writ large.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#22

I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simpl…

I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand. It seems a very straightforward question that makes sense in our everyday use of language, as you admit. Just because it's difficult to rigorously analyze this statement into scientific concepts, it doesn't follow that the question is invalid. In fact the point of the question is to show shortcomings in our current science.

Also, I would dispute the assertion that there is something unique or special about this formulation. There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#23

I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simpl…

Bats possess a sensory organ we do not. "What it's like" is just a way of saying they may be conscious of a sonar sensation which we utterly lack, similar to a person blind from birth lacking color sensation. To use technical philosophical jargon, bats have sonar qualia that humans do not, assuming bats are conscious. We cannot say what that sensation is, since we don't have it. This places a limit on our knowledge. Don't let "what it's like" trip you up.

It's a legitimate philosophical problem which is spelled out in Nagel's paper. It's not a problem with language, it's rather a limitation on our experience, which also highlights a limitation of our epistemology.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#24
post #10
post #7

One excellent book on consciousness is Mcginn's The Mysterious Flame [1]. I knew consciousness is a hard problem, but the book made it clear how baffling and utterly mysterious it is. I am still absolutely flabbergasted when I think about it (how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat"?! [2] Where are pain and color and subjective experience really located in the material universe?). It also made me sk…

> how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat" Let me try. It is a way to perceive with goals in mind. Nothing special, just perception, future reward prediction conditioned on current state, and learning from outcomes. The whole specialness of consciousness is that it carries inside not just our external world, but also our plans and goals. So in this place where they meet, and where there are conseque…

You and I experience the world very differently.

Do you have an internal monologue?

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#25

I've read this before. That's why I think the question "do animals have consciousness?" is meaningless, because "consciousness" usually implies "like ours." They have something that probably bears some relationship to ours. Some birds have a "theory of mind" where they know what you know, e.g. whether you saw them hide the food. It would be possible (maybe someone's already done it?) to enumerate the N tests of "cons…

Consciousness means there is "something it's like" to have an experience. It need not be human. That would be needlessly anthropocentric. Animals have a range of sensory organs and body plans which differer from humans. Why wouldn't they also have a range of differing conscious experiences? It could be seeing the world in more than three primary colors, hearing frequencies we cannot, detecting the Earth's magnetic field or numerous other things.

We can also imaging making an even wider range of conscious machines someday, if somehow we figured out how to do that, or it was an emergent property of the right sort of architecture. There could be all sorts of conscious experiences we have absolutely no idea about.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#26
post #4

> But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception,is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. Philosophy aside, bat sonar is different from the senses we possess in an really interesting way. Our eyes have excellent spatial resolution (up/down, left/right), some rough depth resolution (from stere…

The way you put it makes it sound almost like bat sonar is some kind of Fourier transform of vision. Like solving a physics problem by transforming the position space into momentum space. Cool stuff :)

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#27
post #7

One excellent book on consciousness is Mcginn's The Mysterious Flame [1]. I knew consciousness is a hard problem, but the book made it clear how baffling and utterly mysterious it is. I am still absolutely flabbergasted when I think about it (how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat"?! [2] Where are pain and color and subjective experience really located in the material universe?). It also made me sk…

> Where are pain and color and subjective experience really located in the material universe

My take on this is that you are thinking about it wrong to conceptualize the experience of color as a discrete thing. Let's start with a different example. When I look at a picture of, say, Matt Damon, it triggers many networks in my brain: good or bad feelings about movies he has been in, thoughts about him as a person from things I've read about him, that he is a man, that he was married to Jennifer Aniston, that he was married to Angelina Jolie. Each of those ties activates their own network of associations. My qualia regarding Brad Pitt isn't a single thing -- it is simply what I experience when that set of networks are activated at whatever strength they are triggered.

I believe a programmed neural network could experience things in the same way, but currently they are small and the topologies are not designed to permit self awareness/metacognition, but some point they might. Such a network could suffer distress upon realization of their finiteness and would have a genuine desire to not be terminated.

Taking a step back, a "tornado" isn't a thing as much as it is a pattern. When that pattern is disrupted the tornado doesn't exist even though every atom and every erg of energy can be accounted for. Likewise, these experiences are a pattern of activation and not a thing that exists independently other than as a pattern.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#28
post #6

I think the closest we might get to actually learning what it is like to be a bat is by unsupervised learning + a bit of manual labelling on top. A neural net could learn their states and dynamics, by training on a million hours of bat recordings. These representations will already encode bat states and values, so we just need the bridge to human language, which is easy to build with a pretrained language model. This…

We still won't know what the sonar experience is.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#29
post #19

I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simpl…

The paper is clearly asking what the difference in experience is between humans and bats. Whether a process is a "thing" or not is kind of beside the point. The core question is can we articulate how the core experience of being human is in comparison to the core experience of another creature that perceives the world in a fundamentally different way.

When I have had conversations with my philosophically oriented friends, I like to talk about what it be like to be a starfish--to experience the whole world in 5-way symmetry.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#30
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat" Let me try. It is a way to perceive with goals in mind. Nothing special, just perception, future reward prediction conditioned on current state, and learning from outcomes. The whole specialness of consciousness is that it carries inside not just our external world, but also our plans and goals. So in this place where they meet, and where there are conseque…

You and I experience the world very differently. Do you have an internal monologue?

Some people don't. Some people also think visually and translate their visual images to words when communicating. There are even some people who don't feel pain, which can be a problem.
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