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

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

#101

Post by MarceliusK »

visarga wrote: post #75

I think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in relation to old experience. That makes representation personal, being made of one's own past experience. This does not explain away pure feeling, but explains how we make discriminations of similarity and difference between our experiences, the contents of qua…

Describing that loop from outside is not the same as paying the cost of running it from inside

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

#102

Post by anon-3988 »

KingMob wrote: post #95
dwd wrote: post #74

For a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies: - Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or - Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology. For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolut…

The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness. > "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

This is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not a bat.

This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be you, the commenter. As I am writing this, I am imagining a consciousness on the other side of the monitor that is somewhat like me. But this is just my consciousness extending itself and imagining another consciousness within its own consciousness.

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

#103

Post by simiones »

whakim wrote: post #84
robwwilliams wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clu…

Isn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient to explain consciousness - qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.

> qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.

While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism experiences qualia, and any historical/evolutionary evidence is also lost.

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

#104

Post by skc »

So I've always thought what if each of our individual consciousnesses is like a radio frequency that is unique to each individual? This would explain why we regain consciousness when we wake up, because our physiology is locked to whatever that frequency happens to be.

Under this model, 'you' don't actually reside inside your skull. Instead, your brain is just biological hardware translating a non-local broadcast, meaning our core identity exists independently of the body.

That unique frequency "fingerprint" is close enough in pattern to every other human being that we're able to "understand" each other a process that might manifests in interesting but complex ways eg love and empathy

Bats might be a whole frequency band up!

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

#106

Post by close04 »

anon-3988 wrote: post #102
KingMob wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness. > "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

This is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not a bat. This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be…

> If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat".

This is what makes the question so difficult. The human would experience what is like for a bat to be a bat but in the context of human understanding and consciousness. It already makes too little sense so maybe an analogy to attaching a debugger is getting close? Or "running a bat" as a VM or inside a sandbox in the human mind hypervisor, one brain brain hemisphere is the bat (with virtual peripherals), the other observes and experiences everything as a human.

But in the end the goal would be to have the full bat experience on your own skin and perception, and then process it as a human to understand as a human would.

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

#109

Post by phrotoma »

kreyenborgi wrote: post #107
Linello wrote: post #105

It's very likely related to this beautiful article by Katherine Hayles https://modesofcognition.antikythera.org/

Is there a plain pdf? That page was extremely hard to read and Reader mode doesn't seem to handle it in Firefox

Absolutely savage document reading experience.

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

#110

Post by kreyenborgi »

themafia wrote: post #90

I feel like consciousness is an emergent phenomenon derived from several brain processes that constructively overlap. Many mammals have several necessary elements but lack the complete set of structures necessary to achieve what an average human would identify as "consciousness." Which is why we can probably find loads of examples /and/ counter-examples of "consciousness" throughout the animal kingdom. We already kno…

How would you know? What evidence can you put forth that say a dog or dormouse does not have a conscious experience, but your next door neighbour (presumably human) has?
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