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Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

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Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#61

Post by arthurcolle »

DenisM wrote: post #39
arthurcolle wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. Bats are not blind. No bat species are blind. Microbats have poor visual acuity but their vision is on par with a human's. Reference: Tuttle's work

And that's what I get for relying on "blind as a bat" folklore without checking it. Thank you. I must now ascertain the veracity of the “as poor as a church mouse” trope.

You should now go donate some bucks to Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation for your sins (https://merlintuttlesbatconservation.kindful.com/) ;) since they are by far the coolest mammal. Humans are OK too I guess... I have a really hard time believing any of these echolocation claims by individuals. I can see it maybe coming about if you're visually disabled and over a very long period of time it comes about as your visual cortex atrophies with no stimulation, but otherwise, even if you close your eyes and deeply focus, there are just so many extraneous noises in daily life that would be hard to integrate into a single synthesized whole that is actually meaningful in any kind of physical displacement decisions.

I didn't even know about that trope? Is that even a real expression or did you just make it up? Makes zero sense.

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#62

Post by jholman »

azeirah wrote: post #55
pessimizer wrote: post #40

The fact that blind people make decisions based on active echolocation without realizing that's what they're doing is IMO one of the great arguments against the idea that we're particularly knowledgeable about our own conscious thought processes. How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation by Eric Schwitzgebel and Michael S. Gordon http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/E…

The book "Phi" might interest you, it's written by an influential consciousness researcher, Giulio Tononi. There is one example in the book, I believe, where a person is consciously blind, and is completely convinced they're blind, but when asked to walk through a hallway filled with junk and obstacles, the person passes through the hallway without a problem. When asked, "how did you avoid those obstacles?", they ans…

The blindness/sightedness phenomenon you're describing is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight .

There's a controversial opposite, called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrom...

(Semi-relatedly, plug for Peter Watt's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) )

Your sentence about "It almost seems to me as if..." seems to be hinting at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism / https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/ . This is a theory/proposal that consciousness does not actually cause behaviour, but is simply a subject experience caused by the physical processes that do cause behaviour (how's THAT for a gross oversimplification, fite me bro). I suggest that this is both an interesting theory in its own right, but also an interesting mental exercise to limber up how one thinks about things like volition/free-will and responsibility.

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#64

Post by diminoten »

pessimizer wrote: post #40

The fact that blind people make decisions based on active echolocation without realizing that's what they're doing is IMO one of the great arguments against the idea that we're particularly knowledgeable about our own conscious thought processes. How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation by Eric Schwitzgebel and Michael S. Gordon http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/E…

> the idea that we're particularly knowledgeable about our own conscious thought processes.

Is there anyone out there actually pushing this idea?

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#65

Post by closed »

FigmentEngine wrote: post #18
closed wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true! This reminded me of the first time I came upon Conway's Doomsday Algorithm for telling what day of the week a certain date is. http://rudy.ca/doomsday.html

or Zeller's congruence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeller%27s_congruence

Ah, I had no idea about this one!

Bonus: I just learned the word proleptic...

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#66

Post by PhasmaFelis »

pishpash wrote: post #43
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility. There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a…

I don't know that Google was ever the thing to find them. Various curated lists and word-of-mouth were how they spread. But yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty terrible now for anything that isn't a ho-hum "conventional" query. On the other hand, the sheer volume of information has to count for something. You can reach a greater breadth and depth for directed learning online than in the 90's where it was mostly…

> I don't know that Google was ever the thing to find them. Various curated lists and word-of-mouth were how they spread.

There was a period in the mid-'90s at least when you could find really interesting personal pages by punching any given topic into your search engine of choice. It may actually have been petering out by the time Google arrived in '98, though.

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#67

Post by PhasmaFelis »

lorenzhs wrote: post #23
njarboe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a motorcycle one is much more connected to the environment and I think that is one reason people like them. Its fun to come down into a hollow and feel the temperature change. Smells are also easily detected. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly the motorcycle noise (which can be fun too). Reading this comment made me think it would be really interesting to try out an electric motorcycle.

Or a bicycle or e-bike. Those are also pretty quiet and fun to ride.

In low traffic/back roads on my bike, I can tell if there's a car coming up behind me without having to twist around. Doesn't work if there's other cars drowning it out, and I definitely wouldn't recommend relying on that in most cases, but it's neat.

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#68

Post by skykooler »

mycall wrote: post #38
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad thing for me is that a lot of those strange, eclectic sites are still there, only they became really hard to find. Thanks to Google and other search engines prioritising recency and Brands (with a capital) in all results, the eclectic is penalised to the point of near invisibility. There was never a point to them, but they were hugely interesting. Today there's no point bothering as it would be gone forever a…

Which are your favorites?

I like this page, on creating 3d 'holograms' by hand:

http://amasci.com/amateur/holo1.html

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#69

Post by PhasmaFelis »

arthurcolle wrote: post #61
DenisM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's what I get for relying on "blind as a bat" folklore without checking it. Thank you. I must now ascertain the veracity of the “as poor as a church mouse” trope.

You should now go donate some bucks to Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation for your sins ( https://merlintuttlesbatconservation.kindful.com/ ) ;) since they are by far the coolest mammal. Humans are OK too I guess... I have a really hard time believing any of these echolocation claims by individuals. I can see it maybe coming about if you're visually disabled and over a very long period of time it comes about as your vi…

"Blind as a bat" is a common expression in English. Free Dictionary says it's been around since the 1500s, and theorizes that people thought their erratic flight was due to poor eyesight. https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/blind+as+a+bat

Re: Teach Yourself to Echolocate: A beginner’s guide to navigating with sound

#70

Post by anonytrary »

deckarep wrote: post #5

For anyone wanting to see a master example of echolocation see this short video: https://youtu.be/TeFRkAYb1uk

I remembering learning about this boy in high school. In the posted article, he suggests that non-blind humans can simulate the handicap by wearing a blindfold.

For someone who isn't blind, learning how to do this is very difficult. This is the kind of skill that rewires your brain and comes out of necessity rather than desire. By actually being blind, you get 10,000 hours of practice in around two years. Even if you practiced this an hour a day blindfolded, it would take decades to get 10,000 hours of practice.

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