Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is it like to be a bat?

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 306 posts

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#201

Post by goatlover »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #31
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…

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…

Don't agree with this kind of linguistic dismissal. It doesn't change the fact that we have sensations of color, sound, etc. and there are animals that can see colors, hear sounds and detect phenomena we don't. It's also quite possible they experience the same frequencies we see or hear differently, due to their biological differences. This was noted by ancient skeptics when discussing the relativity of perception.

That is what is being discussed using the "what it's like" language.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#202

Post by dang »

lenerdenator wrote: post #162
dang wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People feel different things, of course, and it's all valid. Nonetheless, there's a standard that we're trying to adhere to here, and comments like these are certainly below it - not a borderline call:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#203

Post by phreeza »

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.

There are attempts at a quantifitative definition of consciousness, for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#204

Post by goatlover »

bondarchuk wrote: post #32
trescenzi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.

> Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing. That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.

That's just idealism. Idealism doesn't have a hard problem. But it does have a problem with accounting for how the world appears to be physical independent of any mind experiencing it, such as before any life evolved or in many places were no life is around.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#205

Post by goatlover »

jibal wrote: post #36
esafak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.

It just means the experience of sensation. You're conscious of a purple object, the smell of brewed coffee, the feeling of a sharp pain, you have a resurfaced memory of a deceased relative, you visualize the beach, you dream of being unprepared for a test, You daydream while driving down a long road, you feel affection seeing a friend, you hear your internal dialog about the boss.

There's nothing incoherent here, they're just talking about subjective states of experience.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#206

Post by phoenixhaber »

adityaathalye wrote: post #17
jm__87 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.

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

[dead]

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#207

Post by AIorNot »

markhahn wrote: post #199
AIorNot wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capab…

Because consciousness itself cannot be explained except through experience ie consciousness (ie first person experience) - not through material phenomena

It’s like explaining music vs hearing music

We can explain music intellectually and physically and mathematically

But hearing it in our awareness is a categorically different activity and it’s experience that has no direct correlation to the physical correlates of its being

The common thought experiment is the color blind researcher experiencing color for the first time(Mary the Colour Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument)

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#208

Post by fsckboy »

anon-3988 wrote: post #186
fsckboy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like you are grappling with the question as intended. you are not answering the question. keep going. consider what it would feel like to be Boltzmann's bat DesCartes in Plato's cave. Ask yourself, "Flappito ergo quod ?"

Imagining yourself flapping your hands in the air is not "what its like to be a bat". People are fooling themselves when they can honestly imagine being a bat. Even the question "I think therefore I am" does not mean that "I" exist. "I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center. There is only reality and its content. And thinking is apparently one of its content.

if you don't accept a>b and b>c, you have nothing to say about "therefore a>c"; you can say nothing about it. if you did accept a>b and b>c then you would agree "therefore a>c"

>"I" here implies a center of thinking. There is no center.

"I think", according to you, implies that I implies a center of thinking, and you don't believe that there is a center, so you don't believe "I think" even more than you don't believe "therefore I am". You don't have an opinion about therefore I am.

it doesn't matter about the "existence" in the predicate, because you don't accept the "I" in the subject.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#209

Post by mock-possum »

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 smells of penny arcade

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#210

Post by GoblinSlayer »

goatlover wrote: post #197
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #196

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 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 capabili…

>Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.

Why not? It works, thus it verifies itself.

Post reply on HN