What is it like to be a bat?
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Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#2[flagged]
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#3I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#4To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#5I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
What brought down your level on convinced?
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#6“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human.
The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#7Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#8To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#9Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat:
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
Re: What is it like to be a bat?
#10To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.