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

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

#91

Post by t-writescode »

dwd wrote: post #74

For a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies: - Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or - Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology. For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolut…

But when you look at brain organoids they quickly find themselves able to play video games as complex as Doom.

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

#93

Post by hackinthebochs »

whakim wrote: post #85
hackinthebochs wrote: post #42

What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt?…

> The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation. Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical…

Presumably the question you're asking is why does a unified self representation require consciousness. (Split brain cases are easy examples of how a break in unification results in incoherent behavior.) The brain nominally performs functions as cascading behavior of atoms whose structural relationships correspond to various functions. But there is no unification at the unconscious/atomistic level therefore a new representational regime is required that can ground the higher level unification.

A successful organism exhibits a high level of competence at reacting appropriately to environmental/sensory states. The "light's being on" is how the brain represents being situated in a world and the significant features therein. Representations within this gestalt are inherently meaningful. For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why). The contents of consciousness is the semantic engine that induces competent behavior over time on otherwise naive entities.

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

#95

Post by KingMob »

dwd wrote: post #74

For a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies: - Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or - Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology. For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolut…

The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness.

> "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

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

#96

Post by MarceliusK »

randallsquared wrote: post #68

> I assume we all believe that bats have experience. Humorously enough, earlier he refers to those who believe that non-human mammals are not all conscious people as "extremists", so it's clear he understands this is not a fully accurate assumption. Two separate meanings of "have experience" are being swapped interchangeably, I think: one is "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or p…

A bat might not have a "personal point of view" in the human sense, but that doesn't mean there is no point of view at all

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

#97

Post by MarceliusK »

dwd wrote: post #74

For a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies: - Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or - Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology. For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolut…

The point isn't that a human could literally sample bat experience. It's that if bat experience exists, it is tied to a form of embodiment and perception that we can describe externally but not fully inhabit subjectively

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

#98

Post by MarceliusK »

bobson381 wrote: post #3

I have always liked the way that this paper frames the distinction and tension between the feeling of subjective experience and the "detached" rational scientific descriptive perspective that purports to be outside of that experience. What is Real by Adam Becker was a fun foray into why this is so in (some) modern science philosophy as well - there's some desire to say that there isn't a "there" there when we talk ab…

Science is incredibly good at producing descriptions that are shareable between observers, but subjective experience is not obviously shareable in that same way

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

#99

Post by KingMob »

visarga wrote: post #75

I think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in relation to old experience. That makes representation personal, being made of one's own past experience. This does not explain away pure feeling, but explains how we make discriminations of similarity and difference between our experiences, the contents of qua…

You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point.

A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience.

tl;dr RGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) !== the subjective experience of red.

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

#100

Post by alberto_ol »

dang wrote: post #51

Related: What is it like to be a bat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 - Sept 2025 (294 comments) What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 - May 2023 (117 comments) What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments) Bonus: A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to…

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