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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?

#91

Post by cwmoore »

biophysboy wrote: post #81
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition…

If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false. The point is that objective measures, like writing, are external, and cannot describe internal subjective experience. Its one thing to probe the atoms; its another thing to be the atoms themselves. Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that i…

Tautologically, its “batty”.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#92

Post by ants_everywhere »

nsriv wrote: post #78
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...

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#93

Post by the_af »

geye1234 wrote: post #63
the_af wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results. Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 i…

I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd?

I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.

It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#94

Post by PreHistoricPunk »

card_zero wrote: post #18
snowram wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.

> I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him. (More Daniel Dennett)

That makes any kind of insight into consciousness as a general term impossible though. That would mean we could not learn anything about human consciousness as such from studying specific persons.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#95

Post by binary132 »

jm__87 wrote: post #64
the_af wrote: post #56

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 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…

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.

In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#96

Post by vehemenz »

jibal wrote: post #65
vehemenz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?

I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning , and no one can say what the phrase means . Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.

I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position.

And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#97

Post by ants_everywhere »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #8
scubakid wrote: post #4

To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.

Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes. Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.

> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.

There's something more to it than this.

For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.

For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#98

Post by IshKebab »

nsriv wrote: post #78
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...

I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.

Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.

Re: What is it like to be a bat?

#100

Post by jibal »

wagwang wrote: post #74
jibal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism. Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.

I've never heard any argument that demonstrates any certainty around physicalism. I like the argument bcuz it sounds nice, but I would never ever claim to know it to be true. I mostly arrived at physicalism because there are eggregious problems with the other theories and physicalism seemed like the suitable default naive answer.

You might want to look at https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/46w6qp/comme...

and

https://faculty.philosophy.umd.edu/pcarruthers/NoM%20-%205.p...

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