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I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
“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…
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers. I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer. Although, I’m not sure I could answer the quest…
“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…
None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers. I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer. Although, I’m not sure I could answer the quest…
Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.
(More Daniel Dennett)
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
What is it like to be another person?