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What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

warwick.ac.uk

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Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#91

Post by maxerickson »

canjobear wrote: post #9
visarga wrote: post #6

I think the closest we might get to actually learning what it is like to be a bat is by unsupervised learning + a bit of manual labelling on top. A neural net could learn their states and dynamics, by training on a million hours of bat recordings. These representations will already encode bat states and values, so we just need the bridge to human language, which is easy to build with a pretrained language model. This…

The point is that no amount of external modeling can give you any knowledge of “what it’s like” subjectively.

You don't have any subjective knowledge of what it's like to be the person you know best either, at least not any meaningful amount in the framework you propose.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#92

Post by hackinthebochs »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #81
hackinthebochs wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. These terms are getting at something central to consciousness, the fact that there is a conceptual duality between how we conceive of it from the first-person and how we conceive of it from an objective standpoint. We can't disavow this conceptual duality, a theorist offering an explanation of consciousness that doesn't capture this dual nature o…

> A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as experiencers of sensations. What, in your opinion, would make for a satisfying explanation of consciousness? I think another nontrivial piece of the puzzle is that it's hard to even know what we are looking for. There are many philosophers who argue (convincingly IMHO) that it doesn't make sense t…

Yeah, its tough to know what a good explanation would even look like. There are so many ways for one thing to resemble another, it's hard to conceive of a new class of resemblance prior to being given an example of it. Resemblance can also depends on one's prior commitments. So its a very dynamic and context dependent property. I don't think there is much hope in identifying what a satisfying explanation of consciousness will look like prior to be presented with one.

That said, I can offer what I take to be a narrowing of the target of promising avenues of investigation. We need a new way to conceptualize existence outside of "thing-based" ontologies. A process ontology would be heading in the right direction. This will perhaps give us the tools to conceptualize a recurrent information-rich dynamical system as a thing in itself (rather than as a collection of individuals with some dynamical behavior). Then we can ask how distinctions are presented to the system on which its behavior and decision-making is determined. A represented distinction is predicated on it being like something or something else to the consumer of the representation such that states can be distinguished. We wouldn't necessarily subjectively resemble this system, but we may recognize our epistemic situation regarding being the target of represented distinctions so that we are confident there is something it is like to be that system.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#93

Post by uoaei »

edgyquant wrote: post #90
uoaei wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reason do you have to do so? What purpose would doing that serve? As it stands you are just suggesting complicated, untestable theories. The point above is, that is ultimately pointless. The simplest possible argument goes as follows: I am conscious, and I am made of matter. Everything else that is real is made of matter. There are other minds out there who also have this experience. With no further information,…

Are you not doing the same? What reason do we have to assume that things don’t have experience?

See the final paragraph of the comment you're referring to.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#94

Post by goatlover »

AlbertCory wrote: post #43
naasking wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In philosophy it literally means "subjective, qualitative experience". It's almost certain that all animals have it, but of course the qualities they experience will be different.

Still begging the question, i.e. assuming that which you need to prove. How would you prove an animal has a "subjective, qualitative experience"?

You can't prove that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It's assumed because other people and animals share similar biological organs and behavior.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#95

Post by mkehrt »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #63
mkehrt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your response it needlessly insulting. The person you are talking about has taken a complex topic and expressed their model for consciousness in a short, clinical way. Then you insult them as not being a real human for describing their model clinically. A more charitable response might be: I don't understand how your model addresses the origin of consciousness. Could you elaborate on that? Personally, I understood th…

Ah, you are probably right. I'm just deeply baffled by their answer.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#97

Post by crispinb »

climb_stealth wrote: post #71

It doesn't quite answer this question but a good resource to learn what bats are like are the Batzilla and Megabattie youtube channels [0]. They are Australian bat rescuers and carers. Lovely ladies, short clips, no clickbait or other stupid youtube shenanigans. Just people who genuinely care for little people and try to spread the word. Educational as well. It feels like I know a whole lot about bats just from watch…

Nice (not to mention surprising) to see a mention of them here (of all places). Both channels are great sources of distraction. Flying foxes are splendid little creatures, and the carers are admirable.

I'm blessed to live somewhere with a healthy flying fox population, and always look forward to the Moreton Bay fig and guava trees around my place fruiting - flying fox squeaks and squeals all night.

I had been hoping to do a mountain marathon in August as a fundraiser for the Tolga Bat hospital in QLD, but I think a calf injury might have put me out of commission for that.

I suppose flying foxes, not being echo-locators, are a little off topic. Though having had them around for some years, I'm very sure it is like something to be one.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#99

Post by piloto_ciego »

I can’t tell anyone adequately (or completely) what it’s like to be me, why should a bat be special?

It all ends up breaking down to analogy at a certain point “well, you know what it feels like when X happens? That’s what it feels like for me when Y occurs.

Some of the simpler analogies are things we all agree on, but they’re not actually “what it’s like to be me.”

What it’s like to be a bat with a new sense could be arrived at through analogy too, but it would be harder, but it’s perfectly possible. Start with what we have in common with bats and build from there.

Re: What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

#100

Post by bondarchuk »

enkid wrote: post #19
bondarchuk wrote: post #15

I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simpl…

The paper is clearly asking what the difference in experience is between humans and bats. Whether a process is a "thing" or not is kind of beside the point. The core question is can we articulate how the core experience of being human is in comparison to the core experience of another creature that perceives the world in a fundamentally different way.

Even when you phrase it that way, you would seem to posit that an experience has a how it is. How something is is ultimately a judgment made by an experiencing subject. In that case, doesn't the question of comparing two "how it is"-judgments regarding experiences of different subjects become incoherent? On the one hand it implies a single experiencer who has two experiences and compares them, but on the other hand we already know that the two experiences we want to compare have different experiencers.

So (forgive me if I'm projecting too much on your particular phrasing :)) here we are still subtly relying on an implied "thing"-ness of an experience, namely as an object which can be extracted out of its original subject and transposed onto another subject.

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