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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?

#191

Post by QuiDortDine »

anon-3988 wrote: post #182
fsckboy wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what does it feel like to be a bat" means what you think you are telling me. it does not mean "what would it feel like to become a bat" "what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described. can someone who has never seen actually describe it to you?

> "what does it feel like to be blind from birth?" can you, a sighted person near-sighted though you may be for this example, even/ever comprehend it no matter how extensively described I am saying that it is not possible. It is entirely possible that you can "see" but not comprehend anything, hence effectively being blind. Is my red your red? Is my hotness your hotness? Is the universe upside down? Is your 3d the sa…

I can't believe all these qualia questions have not evolved in centuries (or at least, the common discourse arond them hasn't). We all have similar rods and cones in our eyes. We have common kinds of color blindness. What other reasonable conclusion is there but that my red is your red? All the machinery is similar enough.

I suppose it's because people associate so much of who they are to the subjectivity of their experience. If I'm not the only one to see and taste the world as I do, am I even special? (The answer is no, and that there are more important things in life than being special.)

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#192

Post by goopypoop »

ars wrote: post #178
TinkersW wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..

Consciousness is awareness of yourself, and then the ability to look at yourself and decide to make a change. Someone conscious is able to choose how they want to behave and then behave that way. For example I can choose to be kind or mean. I can choose to learn to skate or I choose not to. So free will and consciousness are strongly linked. I have seen zero evidence that any other being other than humans can do this…

Some animals show choices - see e.g. the mirror test.

On the other hand, I bet you can't prove that you ever made a free choice.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#193

Post by goopypoop »

astrange wrote: post #176
nsriv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

"Enshittification" is too twee. You can tell it was invented by Cory Doctorow because there is a very specific kind of Gen X person who uses words like that - they have a defective sense of humor vaguely based on Monty Python, never learned when you are and aren't supposed to turn it off, and so they insist on making up random insults like "fuckwaffle" all the time instead of regular swearing.

it's more cromulent than cockwomble

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#194

Post by tooheavy »

Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#195

Post by markhahn »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #155
TinkersW wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't even a definitive definition of conscious, but you are somehow positive that bats don't possess it..

You're right that it doesn't make any sense to talk about it without defining it, but I'd say that consciousness is based on your brain having access to parts of itself internally, not just the outside word, and that bats presumably do have it.

I find that people who complain about "defining" consciousness are, in fact, Mysterians who opposed the very idea of such a definition.

All we need to do (to talk about, to study it) is identify it. We need to be using the word to refer to the same thing. And there's nothing really hard about that.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#196

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

glenstein wrote: post #158
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... "…

I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they are very powerful intuitive reasons for believing they are to the point that I that I'm not particularly concerned about this being a weak link in any philosophical musing on consciousness.

>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they

We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#197

Post by goatlover »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #196
glenstein wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they are very powerful intuitive reasons for believing they are to the point that I that I'm not particularly concerned about this being a weak link in any philosophical musing on consciousness.

>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.

Qualia is the philosophical term for subjective sensations and feelings. It's what our experiences consist of. Why must a concept be empirical and objective? Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.

Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example. We know there are animals that have sensory capabilities we don't. But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#198

Post by ars »

goopypoop wrote: post #192
ars wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is awareness of yourself, and then the ability to look at yourself and decide to make a change. Someone conscious is able to choose how they want to behave and then behave that way. For example I can choose to be kind or mean. I can choose to learn to skate or I choose not to. So free will and consciousness are strongly linked. I have seen zero evidence that any other being other than humans can do this…

Some animals show choices - see e.g. the mirror test. On the other hand, I bet you can't prove that you ever made a free choice.

You are simultaneously claiming you can prove an animal made a choice, but I didn't? That's a contradiction.

In any case, a mirror test is a test of recognizing self, it does not indicate anything in terms of self awareness.

And I chose to fast for 5 days because I wanted to. Nothing forced me, it was a free choice. I simply thought about it and decided to do it, there were no pro's or con's pushing me in either direction.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#199

Post by markhahn »

AIorNot wrote: post #175
brudgers wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

well the hard problem of consciousness gets in the way of that - I assume you as a materialist you mean our brain carries consciousness as a field of experience arising out of neural activity (ie neurons firing, some kind of infromation processing leading to models of reality simulated in our mind leading to ourselves feeling aware) ie that we our awareness is the 'software' running inside the wetware. That's all wel…

whenever I see the word 'reductionist', I wonder why it's being used to disparage.

a materialist isn't saying that only material exists: no materialist denies that interesting stuff (behaviors, properties) emerges from material. in fact, "material" is a bit dated, since "stuff-type material" is an emergent property of quantum fields.

why is experience not just the behavior of a neural computer which has certain capabilities (such as remembering its history/identity, some amount of introspection, and of course embodiment and perception)? non-computer-programming philosophers may think there's something hard there, but they only way they can express it boils down to "I think my experience is special".

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#200

Post by markhahn »

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…

Worship of subjectivity is a tell for Mysterianism.
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