151–160 of 306 posts
Basically, to know what it is like to be a bat, you need to have evolved as a bat.
His theory that our perception is a hallucination generated by a prediction algorithm that uses sensory input to update and correct the hallucination is very interesting.
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Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results. Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 i…
I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd? I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought. It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
It is wrong to claim that brain states (neurons firing) are the same as mental states (thoughts). There are several reasons for this. One is that reducing thoughts to brain states means a thought cannot be correct or incorrect. For example, one series of mental states leads to the thought "2+2=4"; another series leads to the thought "2+2=5". The correctness of the former and the wrongness of the latter refers only to the thought's content, not the physical brain state. If thoughts are nothing more than brain states, it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct -- that is to say, it's a thought that conforms to reality -- and that the other is incorrect. A particular state of neurons and chemicals cannot per se be incorrect or incorrect. If one thought is right (about reality) and another thought is wrong (not about reality), then there must be aspects of thought that are distinct from the physical state of the brain.
If it's meaningless to say that one thought is correct and another is incorrect, then of course nothing we think or say has any connection to reality. Hence the existence of this disagreement, along with the belief that one of us is right and the other wrong, presupposes that the physicalist position is wrong.
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> 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.
The physicalist position wants to reduce the mental to the physical. My thought cannot be reduced from the mental to the physical, because my thought is about a tiger, and a tiger cannot be reduced to a brain state.
If physicalism is true, I can't really be thinking about a tiger, because the tiger in my thought has no physical existence-as-a-tiger, and therefore can't have any existence-as-a-tiger at all. But then I'm not really thinking about a tiger. And the same applies to all our thoughts: physicalism would imply that all our thoughts are delusional, and not about reality at all. A non-physicalist view allows my thought to be actually about a tiger, without that tiger-thought having physical existence.
(Note that I have no problem with the view that the mental and the physical co-incide, or have some kind of causal relationship -- this is obviously true -- only with the view that the mental is reducible to the physical.)
Classic Hofstadter, he introduces a concept called a “Be-Able Thing” (BAT for short)
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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... "…
There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..
Isn’t this just the same as saying an organism is conscious if it perceives? If it is aware of input from one or more senses (and I’m not limiting that to the five human senses)?
If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. Yet that is not so common. There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another. There is only is and its content. That's it. The easiest way to see or get a sense of this is to replace any "I am ..." with "There is a ....". For example, instead of "I…
It depends on your definition of "dualism". If you define it as "having a soul that was created by a higher being", then yes, they are mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, one can also define dualism as being purely evolutionary. David Chalmers [1], an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, has some interesting ideas around how dualistic consciousness may relate to quantum mechanics.
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... "…
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I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
True. I suppose every one of us has asked: What makes me me ? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else? This has puzzled me since childhood.
Not at all. I was shocked when I noticed that how few people have asked themselves this question. In fact, it is impossible to even explain this question to the majority of people. Most people confuse the question with "what makes us intelligent", missing the whole "first person perspective" aspect of it.
I guess evolution tries to stop us from asking question that might lead to nihilism.
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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... "…
There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..
There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.
I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.