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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?

#111

Post by glenstein »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #31
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…

This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition…

>This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails.

I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.

But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#112

Post by glenstein »

mellosouls wrote: post #44
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition…

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…

I don't agree that the inherent nebulousness of the subject extends cover to the likes of Goff, Chalmers (on pansychism), or Searle and Nagel (on the hard problem). It's a both can be true situation and many practicing philosophers appreciate the nebulousness of the topic while strongly disagreeing with the collective attitudes embodied by those names.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#113

Post by ants_everywhere »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #106
ants_everywhere wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

Yeah to be clear I like this mental model a lot, and I give it extra points for invoking sheaf theory :). I was just saying it doesn't seem complete to me from a psychological perspective.

The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.

Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#114

Post by glenstein »

biophysboy wrote: post #81
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition…

If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false. The point is that objective measures, like writing, are external, and cannot describe internal subjective experience. Its one thing to probe the atoms; its another thing to be the atoms themselves. Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that i…

>If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false.

Indeed! Makes you think: maybe it's a bug rather than a feature.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#115

Post by mannykannot »

mellosouls wrote: post #44
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition…

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…

Up to a point I agree, but when someone deploys this vague language in what are presented as strong arguments for big claims, it is they who bear the burden of disambiguating, clarifying and justifying the terms they use.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#116

Post by glenstein »

vehemenz wrote: post #58
ebb_earl_co wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What brought down your level on convinced?

When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be…

>When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness

Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism.

>Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts

If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#117

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

mistidoi wrote: post #7

Somebody 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...

Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask.

The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#118

Post by brudgers »

tech_ken wrote: post #42
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 way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed". "What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states "What is it like to be a bat" => the subjec…

"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states

How do you know that?

Philosophically, of course.

I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.

Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#119

Post by glenstein »

RS-232 wrote: post #46

Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated. Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.…

>Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience.

I was quite liking this explanation but you lost me here. I very strongly agree with your opening, and I think it's the key to everything. I think everyone insisting on a categorical divide runs into impossible problems.

And a good explanation of consciousness has to take the hard problem seriously, but doesn't have to agree that subjective and objective, or first person in third person or whatever you want to call them, are irreducibly distinct categories. But I think it makes more sense to say that some subset of all of the objective stuff out there is simultaneously subjective, rather than saying that all stuff at all times is both objective and subjective. I don't think an apple experiences gravity the way a mind experiences a conscious state, but I do think the through line of understanding them both as importantly physical in the same sense is key to tying physical reality to explanation of conscious states.

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