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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?

#231

Post by dghf »

tooheavy wrote: post #194

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…

Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything.

If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that.

And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#232

Post by rcxdude »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #210
goatlover wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So do an infinite number of sets of statements which include a false one. Circular arguments are obviously not reliable.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#233

Post by rcxdude »

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…

I don't think this matches which most people's definition of consciousness. The ability to decide rarely enters into such conversations.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#234

Post by myrmidon »

Echolocation for humans 101:

Close eyes, make short impulse-like noise (tapping of feet can be sufficient, or snip fingers), and move slowly.

You will find that not running into walls is pretty easy.

Feedback, to me, feels like light pressure on my face. But this sense can be trained a lot; object detection and mapping your proximity is feasible for trained humans, and presumably changes the perception.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#235

Post by jmcmichael »

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”

“Enshittification” updates for the modern era the concept of enclosure, where a common resource that was formerly open and free to contributors is progressively controlled, restricted, or diminished to increase private profits.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#236

Post by GuB-42 »

mistidoi wrote: post #7

Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI). https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...

> What is it like to be an LLM?

That's a question I actually asked myself.

From the point of view of a LLM, words are everything. We have hands, bats have echolocation, and LLMs have words, just words. How does a LLM feel when two words match perfectly? Are they hurt by typos?

It may feel silly to give LLMs consciousness, I mean, we know how they work, this is just a bunch of matrix operations. But does it mean it is not conscious? Do things stop being conscious once we understand them? For me, consciousness is like a religious belief. It is unfalsifiable, unscientific, we don't even have a precise definition, but it is something we feel deep inside of us, and it guides our moral choices.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#237

Post by the_af »

geye1234 wrote: post #230
the_af wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's a question that only makes sense if there's a human asking it. "Correct" is always relative to something, in this case, the meaning a human attaches to that string, a string that only exists as a physical configuration of neurons.

Even without getting into the body-mind duality we are discussing here, it's understood that the string "2+2=4" requires additional context to have meaning, it's just that this context is often implicit (i.e. we're talking about arabic digits in base 10 notation, + is sum as defined in ..., etc).

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#238

Post by the_af »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #217
jm__87 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you, or do you think you remember? Your memories are always distortions, not accurate snapshots of reality.

Have you never thought you remembered something with clarity, only to be told it's impossible because it never happened? Or another example, I often vividly remember something from a book (it was a photograph on this side of the page, lower right corner) and then when I look it up, it was in a different location and it wasn't the photo I remembered. But my mental imagery felt so precise!

I'm with grandparent, I think I would perceive my younger self as simultaneously familiar and alien.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#239

Post by Ukv »

tooheavy wrote: post #194

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…

IMO a lot of this comes from still holding onto the dualist idea of "I" as a separate non-physical entity, and then expecting some region of the brain to act as a link or communication channel to it.

> 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.

Materialism doesn't say that there's some "I" that could experience different persons. I think the best you could do, in theory, is transplant aspects like your personality/train of thought/memories into someone else's brain (by physically altering it to have those aspects).

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#240

Post by IAmBroom »

myrmidon wrote: post #234

Echolocation for humans 101: Close eyes, make short impulse-like noise (tapping of feet can be sufficient, or snip fingers), and move slowly. You will find that not running into walls is pretty easy. Feedback, to me, feels like light pressure on my face. But this sense can be trained a lot; object detection and mapping your proximity is feasible for trained humans, and presumably changes the perception.

Our hearing is more sensitive than we give it credit for being.

We used to play a game in my dojo where we'd toss a "knife" (wooden) around in a circle, as if sending it to an ally. Yes, you could throw it in a way that can't be caught... but then the person picks it up and chooses how to throw it back. You learn quickly not to be a dick about it.

Naturally, we were trying to get better at catching, and eventually moved to a trust version, where I shout "Go!" as I throw the knife. Turns out you can hear the knife leaving someone's hands more reliably than they can shout "Go!" on time.

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