Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is it like to be a crab?

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 81 posts

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#61

Post by nocoiner »

causi wrote: post #44
fsckboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just to add on with a slant toward the types of things HN is interested in, the point of "what is it like to be a bat" is essentially, you can't know what it's like to be a bat unless you are a bat (and I don't mean the paper should be read for that conclusion, you develop far more insight thinking your way through it) The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday t…

how do I even know my red is your red I get why kids ask this. I don't get why adults ask this. If you have normal color vision and don't have a tumor in your visual cortex your red is as close to my red as the red subpixels are on two units of the same television. Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware.

I see different color temperature casts in each of my eyes. So, depending on the eye, my red isn’t even my own red! Seems like a perfectly valid question given the complexity of the human vision system.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#62

Post by dl9999 »

BoardsOfCanada wrote: post #42

I have a very alternative perspective, especially coming from an applied physics background. I don’t know if anyone has experienced what it is like to be a crab, but I know that there are people who claim to have experienced events from other animals perspective, and hundred of thousands that claim to have done so from other humans' perspective, in near death experiences. A few years ago I thought that NDEs basically…

I have a similar interest in NDEs. 30 years ago I "knew" what they were. Now I'm not so sure.

Do you have any links to articles about the blind people knowing what color clothes people were wearing?

Thanks.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#63

Post by the-mitr »

sowbug wrote: post #21

The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? . I assume the article title is a riff on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

I read this article as part of fantastic anthology The Mind's Eye edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#64

Post by RHSman2 »

fsckboy wrote: post #32
sowbug wrote: post #21

The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? . I assume the article title is a riff on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

just to add on with a slant toward the types of things HN is interested in, the point of "what is it like to be a bat" is essentially, you can't know what it's like to be a bat unless you are a bat (and I don't mean the paper should be read for that conclusion, you develop far more insight thinking your way through it) The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday t…

The uniqueness of being. Imagine being a you that is totally at odds with what the world is telling you the way you are supposed to feel.

Look in the mirror and see your physical being, but if you remove the vision and we would be so very different in the way we interpret reality and how we reconcile them with how we feel.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#65

Post by lubujackson »

causi wrote: post #44
fsckboy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just to add on with a slant toward the types of things HN is interested in, the point of "what is it like to be a bat" is essentially, you can't know what it's like to be a bat unless you are a bat (and I don't mean the paper should be read for that conclusion, you develop far more insight thinking your way through it) The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday t…

how do I even know my red is your red I get why kids ask this. I don't get why adults ask this. If you have normal color vision and don't have a tumor in your visual cortex your red is as close to my red as the red subpixels are on two units of the same television. Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware.

The interesting thing is that so much of color (and vision in general) is software, not hardware. Our eyes don't see color and light the way we we perceive them at all, it is a composite of multiple sensors each doing different things. Colors like magenta are almost entirely constructed by our brains in software because we don't physically register them but recognize their presence.

Then there is the element of how we define colors at all - some languages have no word for blue, for instance. People can see and distinguish the color but without context along the spectrum they way they understand the color is definitely influenced by lots of contextual factors. So from that perspective, we certainly do not all perceive colors the same.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#67

Post by trealira »

fsckboy wrote: post #32
sowbug wrote: post #21

The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? . I assume the article title is a riff on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

just to add on with a slant toward the types of things HN is interested in, the point of "what is it like to be a bat" is essentially, you can't know what it's like to be a bat unless you are a bat (and I don't mean the paper should be read for that conclusion, you develop far more insight thinking your way through it) The old "how do I even know my red is your red" is a little piece of this puzzle. Perhaps someday t…

> Now, that was just a rehash, which you didn't need me for. What I want to add on is--everybody remain civil, this is a serious intellectual question--we know what transgender people feel like they aren't, but do they know what it feels like to be what they believe they are? Of course it feels like "you" (or "me", depending the voice I'm supposed to be writing) but comparatively, how would anybody know what else it feels like?

They don't. How could they? At most, they know what it's like to have lived life as one sex, then take hormones, have surgeries done on themselves, and "pass" as the other sex. If they started passing when they were 25, then they kind of know what it's like to be a 25 year old of the other sex, assuming that their mind and behaviors also match the other sex, and they've abandoned all contact with people who knew them prior to transition. And they still don't know what it's like to have the body of someone who was actually born as the sex to which they've transitioned.

But most don't get that far. Most MtFs instead only know what it's like to be treated as a femininely dressed guy with breasts whom the more progressive-minded people take pity on and call "she" sometimes. The non passing FtMs only know what it's like to be treated as a woman with a beard and a deeper voice. It's tragic.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#68

Post by The_Colonel »

messe wrote: post #51
causi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do I even know my red is your red I get why kids ask this. I don't get why adults ask this. If you have normal color vision and don't have a tumor in your visual cortex your red is as close to my red as the red subpixels are on two units of the same television. Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware.

> Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware. But to continue your analogy, after so many years of experiencing the world differently—different pasts, upbringings, worldviews—are they being interpreted by the same software? And that's the question that the paper really poses: are qualia real, and if so, is it ever possible to conclude th…

My intuition says yes, they are basically perceived the same way. Color recognition is so elementary it seems more hardware-based than software-based. I think there are better examples for the point (which I assume it's trying to make). Take a piece of rock, does it look the same way to different people? (there the answer is IMHO no).

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#69

Post by BoardsOfCanada »

dl9999 wrote: post #62
BoardsOfCanada wrote: post #42

I have a very alternative perspective, especially coming from an applied physics background. I don’t know if anyone has experienced what it is like to be a crab, but I know that there are people who claim to have experienced events from other animals perspective, and hundred of thousands that claim to have done so from other humans' perspective, in near death experiences. A few years ago I thought that NDEs basically…

I have a similar interest in NDEs. 30 years ago I "knew" what they were. Now I'm not so sure. Do you have any links to articles about the blind people knowing what color clothes people were wearing? Thanks.

I'm pretty sure it is from David Suich, and I believe I have heard him make the claim more than once in interviews, however since I have his book "God took my clothes" (rating 3 out of 5, had higher hopes) the only thing I found was:

Of the hundreds of near-death experiences that I have heard, two of them were from people who were blind since birth. During their experiences, they could see for the first time. They were not able to say which colors they saw because they have never learned what colors go with which name. They could only describe what they saw as different intensities and shades of light and color.

So, I'd look at a few of the interviews he gave on youtube and be careful with believing that it was exactly as I claimed. Also, whether this was reported by the experiencer or told to credible people in the room on wakeup, it's still a lot less scientifically rigid than most unreplicatable experiments in other fields.

(And a paranthesis, these journeys are within each of us, but about not being sure what NDEs are, if they are actually happening as experienced, they happen in a reality with a completely different metaphysics, seemingly projected onto the (far lower dimensional) concepts understood by the experiencer. If anything I find NDEs refreshingly straightforward with friendly guides explaining things in ways that make sense, a concept of God that is without the paradoxes of Abrahamic religions, explanations for sufferings and evil that don't conflict with a benevolent God. Compare it to the absolute confusion that is UFO encounters, while similar, are full of nonsensical elements and seem designed to deceive and confuse. But about the actual nature of it, what could we really understand?)

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#70

Post by messe »

The_Colonel wrote: post #68
messe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, you can't look at them and positively measure their identicalness, but they're being generated with the same hardware. But to continue your analogy, after so many years of experiencing the world differently—different pasts, upbringings, worldviews—are they being interpreted by the same software? And that's the question that the paper really poses: are qualia real, and if so, is it ever possible to conclude th…

My intuition says yes, they are basically perceived the same way. Color recognition is so elementary it seems more hardware-based than software-based. I think there are better examples for the point (which I assume it's trying to make). Take a piece of rock, does it look the same way to different people? (there the answer is IMHO no).

> My intuition says yes, they are basically perceived the same way. Color recognition is so elementary it seems more hardware-based than software-based

In which case you're missing the point of the fucking example. Colour is just being used as an easily definable (to some extent) sensation. "What is it like to perceive this particular rock" doesn't roll quite off the tongue so well, and intuition is exactly the aspect that this discussion attempts to avoid in order to be as objective as possible with regard to an inherently subjective experience.

Post reply on HN