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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?

#121

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

edbaskerville wrote: post #102

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...

> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision

Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.

In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#122

Post by glenstein »

snowram wrote: post #16
bee_rider wrote: post #11

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.

It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning).

I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#123

Post by glenstein »

antonvs wrote: post #25
card_zero wrote: post #9

Dennett 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…

What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing? Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)

It gives obvious examples of the way our awareness of factual circumstances give us inroads into what might be experienced. And the upshot is that this might suggest the rest of consciousness can be understood by iterating forward in a similar manner. Dennett makes this exact same point about Mary's Room. Far from talking past the article, it's attacking the fundamental principle.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#124

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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…

Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does.

The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#125

Post by AIorNot »

socrateswasone wrote: post #120

It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.

Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals

If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so

IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity

Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#126

Post by AIorNot »

tim333 wrote: post #104

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?

You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :)

But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#127

Post by glenstein »

wagwang wrote: post #13

Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism. 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 o…

>Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem.

I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.

I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#128

Post by AIorNot »

bee_rider wrote: post #11

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…

That’s called meta cognition (what humans do) not subjective experience - which is the feeling of what happens and sets animal or agentic creatures apart from rocks (not sure about plants)

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#129

Post by glenstein »

jibal wrote: post #72
geye1234 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in…

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…

Whoheartedly agree. I think what they're stressing though if I'm understanding correctly, is we do kind of start in a Cartesian space, and branch out via inferences to the presumption of an external world. And, from a certain philosophical perspective, one could point to that and insist that at any moment that connection could be the weak link that brings all of epistemology crashing down. We could get unhooked from the simulation, so to speak, open our real eyes, and witness a new world with new bedrock alternatives to our notions of causality, qualia, and so on.

I don't believe any of that to be true, but I think that's kind of the point of that argument. I do think we start from that Cartesian starting place, but once we know enough about the external world to know that we're a part of it, and can explain our mind in terms of it, it effectively shifts the foundation, so that our mental states are grounded in empirical reality rather than the other way around.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#130

Post by AIorNot »

cl3misch wrote: post #84
adityaathalye wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.

That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!

You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao

Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true

(Warning: Gets into spiritual stuff)

https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g

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