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

51–60 of 306 posts

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#51

Post by the_af »

RS-232 wrote: post #46

Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated. Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.…

> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.

If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?

How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#54

Post by geye1234 »

wagwang wrote: post #13

Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism. Exhibit a > Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence o…

Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).

If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#55

Post by curiousguy7374 »

RS-232 wrote: post #46

Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated. Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.…

But I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat

Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#56

Post by the_af »

jm__87 wrote: post #14
adityaathalye wrote: post #6

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.” — Kurt Vonnegut In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human. The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago , one is not…

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, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#57

Post by bondarchuk »

trescenzi wrote: post #40
bondarchuk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experienc…

>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”

I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.

>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?

No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#58

Post by vehemenz »

ebb_earl_co wrote: post #5
vehemenz wrote: post #3

I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.

What brought down your level on convinced?

When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#59

Post by the_af »

geye1234 wrote: post #54
wagwang wrote: post #13

Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism. Exhibit a > Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence o…

Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (…

> Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around)

Why cannot it?

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#60

Post by axus »

antonvs wrote: post #49
bondarchuk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are n…

> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious. Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question. In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what C…

A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
Post reply on HN