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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?

#221

Post by GoblinSlayer »

AIorNot wrote: post #207
markhahn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Experience doesn't look necessary: we consider tesseract explained even though we can't experience it.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#222

Post by epiphenomenal »

visarga wrote: post #215
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 s…

Cybernetics is behind all modern AI (Turing was a cyberneticist), and also modern cognitive science with the ideas close to hybrid computing, neuromorphic computing, enactivism, embodied minds etc. Basically, cyberneticists were functionalists - and that allows for multiple realizability.

At the core of the book is the question of consciousness and qualia (and I do believe that a walkthrough through computational complexity is necessary, especially taking into account TIME and SPACE for both human neural processing and artificial one, differentiating between being incomputable in principle, being incomputable in practice or being tractable.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#223

Post by bondarchuk »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #76
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…

I believe you're falling into a purely linguistic trap. In other languages we wouldn't even use the word "like" in this kind of constructions, that's an English thing because other wordings sound awkward, but I don't think it entails comparison. In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?" In French, "Quel effet cel…

Interesting point on the translations, but of course we can't really draw any conclusions from it regarding Nagel's intentions when he wrote in English.

Besides, I would not call "there is something it is like to be [...]" a "good and clear" construction. As mentioned on wikipedia, it has 'achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution"' - I don't think a specific locution would get special status if it was just any arbitrary way of pointing at what people already understand anyway (i.e. the concept "subjective experience").

>Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.

I agree these would be more or less equivalent, and I think your version is still making the same false distinction as Nagel's by positing a distinct "something". Only it does so (commendably) in a more clear and obvious way, thus it would never become the standard phrasing for people looking to sneak in dualist assumptions :)

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#224

Post by tim333 »

AIorNot wrote: post #126
tim333 wrote: post #104

Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?

You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :) But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture

Though you could have like a slider control for more or less bat.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#226

Post by KolibriFly »

btown wrote: post #108

My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat , and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0]. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how c…

I like your point that translation isn't just technical, it's political. Every attempt to "bridge the gap" shapes power as much as it conveys meaning

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#227

Post by KolibriFly »

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…

It might be one of those cases where the philosophical hook works because of its rhetorical power

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#228

Post by bondarchuk »

sethev wrote: post #146
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…

That particular phrasing happened to catch on, but I don't think it's essential to any of the arguments. How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't? Or are you saying that that distinction is just a verbal trick?

>How would you phrase the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't?

You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#229

Post by bondarchuk »

genericspammer wrote: post #80
bondarchuk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical tric…

There’s no trick to it, you’re overanalyzing. It’s just saing if I were a stone -> no experience, a bat -> some kind of experience. It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.

>It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.

Certainly it's not claiming to define it, but it is making a claim about the existence of the "something", and also about the physical irreducibility of this "something".

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#230

Post by geye1234 »

the_af wrote: post #168
geye1234 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I will try to respond later, but briefly:

> "right" or "wrong" are human values

Would 2+2=4 be correct, and 2+2=5 be incorrect, only if there were a human being to say so?

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