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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?

#241

Post by IAmBroom »

the_af wrote: post #56
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.

> 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…

Autistic people have in part answered that question. Some of them feel actual pain at unwanted touches or undesirable textures.

Pain, like vision, resides in the brain; like vision it is mostly determined by reports from our (non-brain) nervous system, but pain, light flashes, even objects and people can be created whole-cloth by the brain itself. And "real" inputs can be ignored, like a mild pain you're desensitized to, or the gorilla walking amongst the ball-passers in that video.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#242

Post by IAmBroom »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #121
edbaskerville wrote: post #102

Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up. I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight. In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.

> In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one,

What do you mean by that distinction?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#243

Post by Mumps »

GuB-42 wrote: post #236
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…

You activated a memory of a passage in one of my favourite books ( Blindsight, Peter Watts. it's amazing and free online):

I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.

I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.

I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#244

Post by GoblinSlayer »

rcxdude wrote: post #232
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That's a hypothesis of a counterexample, though, not a fact of a counterexample.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#245

Post by txrx0000 »

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…

Materialism is indeed on shaky ground, but the ground shakes everywhere else, too.

The problem of consciousness has no real solution. A quick way to demonstrate this is via the simulation hypothesis. Consider the following for yourself in first person:

It's impossible to know for certain whether I am in a simulation until I wake up outside of it. Not having observed any evidence of being inside a simulation (probability=0) doesn't necessarily mean I'm certainly in base reality. It could be that the evidence just hasn't been observed yet. And even then, it's impossible to know whether that outer world is a simulation until I wake up in the outer-outer-world, and so on.

That is to say, if my definition of real equals my consciousness equals my existence, I'm really saying that consciousness/reality/existence is a self-defining thing.

Descartes' cogito had unexamined metaphysical convictions. "I think, therefore I am" is not compatible with consciousness because rationality has consciousness as a dependency. If I think back on my entire conscious experience as a timeline, I was conscious before I was rational. I had to derive rationality from experience, not the other way around.

Now I throw away those convictions. "I think" means the same thing as "I am", and "therefore" is a decorative force of habit rather than a reference to logic. In which case, "I think, therefore I am" is the same as: I observe that I observe.

Is the same as: I observe.

Is the same as: I am.

There is no certainty beyond this, only convictions. Even if I'm truly a human brain in a matter-based world, the world would still appear uncertain to this brain in this way.

"A scientist rejecting consciousness is not that different from a nun accepting god in this regard. Neither of them are fully honest with themselves and the world."

That's what I find myself thinking as I take a materialist stance and assume that this is base reality and other people are real in the same way that I am. This appears to fit all of my observations the best, so far, after all.

// end of monologue

And here's my pitch, from me to you:

Let's be provisional materialists together. You can't know if it's the ultimate truth but you can make the correct predictions more often and not be alone while doing it.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#246

Post by tooheavy »

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…

I'm open to there being something in reality that explains being someone or a specific person. Having a specific location in reality raises the question of how it came to be and what are the possibilities or limits - it's a piece of unexplained information that suggests more information and explanation is needed. Saying it is meaningless or assumed actually appears to not explain anything. But I would have to think about it more.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#247

Post by sethev »

bondarchuk wrote: post #228
sethev wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's just a label, though, it makes no attempt to describe the difference. You could say a conscious object has subjective experience, but that's open to the same observation that it implies there are two things (the subject and the experience).

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#248

Post by nurettin »

GuB-42 wrote: post #236
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…

> Are they hurt by typos?

I've been thinking about that. Would they perform worse if I misspell a word along the way?

It looks like even the greatest models of 2025 are utterly confused by everything when you introduce two contradicting requirements, so they definitely "dislike" that.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#249

Post by tooheavy »

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…

[dead]

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#250

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 cannot edit my other comment any longer, but I want to add that it's far from my intention to sound as if I'm lecturing anyone, I'm well aware a lot of these are open questions -- possibly unresolvable -- and I don't consider myself an expert or well-read on this topic. I find it fascinating to discuss. All of my remarks/questions/disagreements with you are made in good faith.)
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