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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?

#211

Post by GoblinSlayer »

TinkersW wrote: post #138
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... "…

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

Consciousness is software. You can imagine what AbstractFactoryProviderFactory is like. Is it the same inside computer? If not, then what was imagined?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#212

Post by 4gotunameagain »

astrange wrote: post #187
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…

This is a spiritual error called monism. It's taking non-dualism too far. > As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see. There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places. Monism requires you to deny actually existing differences by saying they're not "real". > There should be no difference between my thoughts, s…

> There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places.

That is according to our human perception. For example a single, uniform 4D object could have a projection in 3D that appears as two distinct 3D objects. I am not claiming that a fourth spacial dimension exists, only that we cannot possibly know what exists.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#213

Post by scott_w »

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…

> Why must a concept be empirical and objective?

Because otherwise it's your word against mine and, since we both probably have different definitions of consciousness, it's hard to have a meaningful debate about whether bats, cats, or AI have consciousness.

I'm reminded of a conversation last year where I was accused of "moving the goalposts" in a discussion on AI because I kept pointing out differences between artificial and human intelligence. Such an accusation is harder to make when we have a clearly defined and measurable understanding of what things like consciousness and intelligence are.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#215

Post by visarga »

epiphenomenal wrote: post #214

I think I wrote a whole book around this. :)) Feel free to reach out at theillusionengine@gmail.com for a draft :) https://illusionengine.xyz/ :)

Interesting topic, but I can only see one chapter. Based on chapter names it seems you lean closer to cybernetics or process philosophy. Is that true? I find ignoring time and process to be the greatest sin in the field of consciousness. The big issue is not that we don't know the quantum trick or property-dualism that explains consciousness, but that we try to remove time and process from it. That is impossible, a static explanation will never capture dynamic execution of a system.

I worked on similar topics, I publish on a "personal" subreddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#216

Post by visarga »

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

We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.

They say "because of similar structure and behavior" we infer others are also conscious. But that is a copout, we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.

Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.

Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#217

Post by GoblinSlayer »

jm__87 wrote: post #64
the_af wrote: post #56

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 I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, disco…

Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.

My mind drastically changed several times, and I somewhat remember how it worked previously.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#218

Post by scott_w »

ars wrote: post #198
goopypoop wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dire…

> Some animals show choices

They said animals show choices, they did not claim to prove animals made a choice. The point is that you also cannot prove you made a choice, only that you do things that show you may have made a choice. It's a fine, but important, distinction.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#219

Post by GoblinSlayer »

brudgers wrote: post #109
cwmoore wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them. [0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/

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.

Nervous system and bones work differently, because they have different structure, that's materialism alright.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#220

Post by ulrischa »

He anticipated an AI problem decades early. Replace “bat” with “LLM” or “alien intelligence,” and the paper reads like a warning: describing behavior and mechanisms might never reveal the inner feel, if there is one, to outsiders.
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