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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?

#161

Post by glenstein »

safety-space wrote: post #144

Science studies the physical and measurable. Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That’s why the “hard problem” sits outside what science, by definition, can explain.

>Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable.

That's just a question begging assertion, and there's plenty of empirical knowledge of necessary physical conditions for consciousness as well as predictable physical influences on conscious states. Whether consciousness is "measurable" is part of what's at issue and can't just be definitionally presupposed.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#162

Post by lenerdenator »

dang wrote: post #53
lenerdenator wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here.

Feels pretty substantive to me. Just because it's not what you were going for in relation to the discussion of that work doesn't mean it's unsubstantive. I approached it from the position Nagel brought up, which is reductive. They have life experiences that none of us can fathom, so we reduce it to what we know of them, which in my case is them living in my attic, much to my chagrin.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#163

Post by brudgers »

AIorNot wrote: post #132
brudgers wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So how does a radical materialist explain consciousness- that it is too is a fundamental material phenomena? If so are you stretching the definition of materialism? I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood

It doesn’t explain it.

Consciousness is a characteristic of material/matter/substance/etc.

There are not two types of stuff.

It is epistemologically rigorous. And simple.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#164

Post by glenstein »

socrateswasone wrote: post #141
AIorNot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rat…

You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit. Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal…

>Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process

I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses.

I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#165

Post by fsckboy »

anon-3988 wrote: post #148

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…

>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.

what's it like to be a human?

"There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." -- anon-3988

it does?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#167

Post by jmbwell »

parpfish wrote: post #131
IshKebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.

Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”

It’s about the change from endeavoring to produce a product people want regardless of profit, to making profit regardless of what people want.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#168

Post by the_af »

geye1234 wrote: post #152
the_af wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Here's something I posted a while ago, I'm copying and pasting with a few slight edits: 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 thoug…

There's a leap you're making I cannot follow.

I agree with this: the physical configuration of neurons, their firings, the atoms that make them, etc, cannot be "right" or "wrong". This wouldn't make sense in reality; it either is or isn't, and "right" or "wrong" are human values. The universe is neither right nor wrong, it just is.

What about the thoughts those neuron firings mean to us? Well, a good argument can be made that they are also not "right" or "wrong" in isolation, they are just phenomena. Trivially, a thought of "2+2=4" is neither right nor wrong, it's only other thoughts that consider it "right" or "wrong" (often with additional context). So the values themselves can be a physical manifestation.

So it seems to me your problem can be resolved like this: in response to a physical configuration we call a "thought", other "thoughts" can be formed in physical configurations we call "right" or "wrong".

The qualities of "right" or "wrong" only exist as physical configurations in the minds of humans.

And voila! There's no incompatibility between the physical world and thoughts, emotions, "right" or "wrong".

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#169

Post by anon-3988 »

fsckboy wrote: post #165
anon-3988 wrote: post #148

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…

> 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. what's it like to be a human? "There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." -- anon-3988 it does?

If you become the bat, you become the bat. There is nothing permanent that is being transferred. When you think of "being the bat", you have this image of thinking "oh shit, i am a bat now!? I can echolocate and shit". Its more like, ...what? The imagination of being another person is simply an imagination that arises within this body, spirit, soul, or whatever it is.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#170

Post by derektank »

anon-3988 wrote: post #148

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…

Secular != Strict Materialist

There are far fewer of the latter than the former

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