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What is it like to be a bat?

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Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#101

Post by jibal »

vehemenz wrote: post #96
jibal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning , and no one can say what the phrase means . Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.

I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position. And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a g…

What "defensiveness"? And you're accusing me of bad faith? Stick to talking about ideas, not people. I won't engage with you further.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#102

Post by edbaskerville »

Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.

I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#103

Post by jibal »

geye1234 wrote: post #82
jibal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making a number of unsupported assertions. There's a massive amount of literature in support of physicalism. And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid". No metaphysical stance can be proved. > Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is. This is simply wrong ... there are v…

> And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid". Oh this is undoubtedly true, and my argument was limited to the statement that the most common argument for physicalism is invalid. I was not launching an attack on physicalism itself. > No metaphysical stance can be proved. That's an interesting metaphysical stance, but again, I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics, just pointing out the main weak…

> I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics

You attacked physicalism for not being proven.

I disagree with your arguments and I think they are hopelessly confused. Since our views are conceptually incommensurate, there's no point in continuing.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#104

Post by tim333 »

Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#105

Post by thunky »

the_af wrote: post #56
jm__87 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, disco…

> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc

Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.

Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#106

Post by kelseyfrog »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #97
kelseyfrog wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes. There's something more to it than this. For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly dis…

I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as

> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.

There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:

1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.

2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.

3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.

At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#107

Post by brudgers »

bondarchuk wrote: post #19

> "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism." 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 la…

The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”.

The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.

To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…

…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.

Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#108

Post by btown »

My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0].

It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking.

At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture?

What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind?

Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.

While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#109

Post by brudgers »

cwmoore wrote: post #89
mellosouls wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness. The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms. To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarg…

“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them. [0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/

As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not.

Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#110

Post by daoboy »

Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand.

"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."

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