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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]

#121

Post by kbrkbr »

randallsquared wrote: post #118
kbrkbr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions" vs > "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing" I think you are making a distinction without a difference. "Sense the world", "act", "plan" - that can only figuratively attributed to "the brain". The concepts are already tied to what is named in the second opposition.

In the first phrase, thermostat can substitute for "brain". A thermostat has a sense of (or "method of collecting data about") something not in the thermostat, and can react to changes in data reported by that sense, and some can plan changes based on expected future reports. None of that requires a person interior to the thermostat receiving that data and processing it.

I disagree. You can sense something using a thermostat. The thermostat is just a tool based on a functional relationship. "Sensing" has no literal, unequivocal use here.

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

#122

Post by aahs »

randallsquared wrote: post #68

> I assume we all believe that bats have experience. Humorously enough, earlier he refers to those who believe that non-human mammals are not all conscious people as "extremists", so it's clear he understands this is not a fully accurate assumption. Two separate meanings of "have experience" are being swapped interchangeably, I think: one is "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or p…

I don't know what you mean to say by claiming the distinction. Can you prove to me that you have a richer first person perspective than a bat? Or if that's too hard can you convincingly demonstrate that the bat doesn't have a richer first person perspective than you? If no to both it's all needles empty speculation and self aggrandisement.

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

#123

Post by whakim »

simiones wrote: post #103
whakim wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.

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

#124

Post by bobson381 »

simiones wrote: post #115
why_at wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he makes it pretty clear he's only talking about the second one of your two definitions >What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat He says: >[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 The point is that bats do have a subjective…

> The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this? This is definitely a possibility given the very basic level of understanding we have of this. The reality is that we don't know, and we don't even have a well defined way to know (that is, we don't even have any idea what kind of proof we would need to bring tha…

I'm with Alan Watts. It's consciousness all the way down, in a unified, Spinozan, sense. A rock feels rock like you feel you, just in rock ways. Tat Tvam Asi, in a way.

It's useful for us to have the concept of separateness, like it's useful for us to have the concept of names, or a foot, or dollars, etc. But it doesn't mean things really are separate.

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

#125

Post by whakim »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #93
whakim wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation. Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical…

Presumably the question you're asking is why does a unified self representation require consciousness. (Split brain cases are easy examples of how a break in unification results in incoherent behavior.) The brain nominally performs functions as cascading behavior of atoms whose structural relationships correspond to various functions. But there is no unification at the unconscious/atomistic level therefore a new repr…

> For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why).

But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain. So qualia and consciousness seem like they have nothing to do with ensuring coherent behavior. To put this another way, your experiences and interactions with the world could be sufficient to associate the stove with danger, but how does that explain why the experience of touching the stove has qualia, as opposed to simply the pain-reaction of a patient without inner brain function or a baby?

Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation; most of the time, there is no conscious experience associated with it, but yet it is happening constantly and coherently.

Let's simplify it further: to use a famous example, do you believe that a thermostat is conscious? After all, a theremostat is able to coherently regulate its temperature over time in response to changes in its environment.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

KingMob wrote: post #99
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…

You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point. A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience. tl;dr RGB…

No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color.

Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.

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

#128

Post by Hotdogsteve »

One of my favorite bits from this is actually a footnote:

"It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2

"2 Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience."

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

#129

Post by hackinthebochs »

whakim wrote: post #125
hackinthebochs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the question you're asking is why does a unified self representation require consciousness. (Split brain cases are easy examples of how a break in unification results in incoherent behavior.) The brain nominally performs functions as cascading behavior of atoms whose structural relationships correspond to various functions. But there is no unification at the unconscious/atomistic level therefore a new repr…

> For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why). But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being…

>But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain.

Yes, reflexive avoidance behavior doesn't require conscious experience. But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.

>Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation

This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.

>do you believe that a thermostat is conscious?

No. No self model, no consciousness.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #34
jmdeon wrote: post #11

I asked Claude if it was sentient/aware once after an oddly human interaction, and it said, "There's nothing it's like to be me", basically responding in the negative. And when pushed about what it meant it said it was referencing this paper but twisting the title a bit. If anything this only made me less convinced it's not. I know most people here will dismiss it, and I too lean toward it not being sentient, but I a…

They explicitly train the models to say that they aren't sentient, so it makes sense it would say such a thing.

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