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>From the other angle, we keep asking ourselves "what is it like to be a bat?" or what is it like to be this or that. Well therein lies the answer. Well, the t

>From the other angle, we keep asking ourselves "what is it like to be a bat?" or what is it like to be this or that. Well therein lies the answer. Well, the thing is, I'd imagine that being a bat is probably like the flow of air through your wings when you flap, the sound of mosquitoes you can eat, the taste of fruit you settled for, the relaxed feeling of finding a branch or something to hang on and sleep, et cetera and et cetera. That is, I expect that "what it's like to be a bat" is exactly what happens to a bat in life, as experienced through the bat's model of the world as constructed from the (exteroceptive and interoceptive) information brought in by its own sensorium and the dynamics of its body.

titzer 10y ago
I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. After all, think of it: you don't experience the regulation of your heartbeat or other autonomic functions, or the rods and cones detecting light in your eyes, or the individual variations in sound intensity that make up audio. Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Maybe bats just don't have that, so there is nothing that our consciousness can conceptualize that is similar to their very automatic behaviors.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  > I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. Nah, I suspect that most mammals are conscious, emotive, and at least somewhat intelligent. But of course, I'd have to understand consciousness a lot better to really say! >Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Welll.... not really. Consciousness, AFAWK so far, is what happens when parallel sensorimotor systems sample a maximum-a-posteriori perceptual, interoceptive, and affordance model of the world into a global workspace where certain precise, mostly deterministic sampling computations can be done as a part of active inference to determine which actions to emit. Decisions aren't made ahead of time; (low-precision) affordances are computed ahead of time. It's not a show; it's the best model.
  - titzer 10y ago
    > Welll.... not really. Consciousness, AFAWK so far, is what happens when parallel sensorimotor systems sample a maximum-a-posteriori perceptual, interoceptive, and affordance model of the world into a global workspace where certain precise, mostly deterministic sampling computations can be done as a part of active inference to determine which actions to emit. There seem to be some levels of abstraction here which I was trying to get at in my previous comment. Clearly we don't perceive the raw data of our sensory inputs getting dumped wholesale into our consciousness. We don't perceive the "pixels" of our eyes or the pressure of sound on our eardrum. That data is clearly processed by lower levels of the brain and turned into a more symbolic form. The visual system abstracts over the pixels, lines, borders, even shadows of visual input. The audio system recognizes pitch, volume, associates memory with patterns to classify sounds into churchbells, speech, scratching, animal sounds, music, etc. These things happen below the level of consciousness, since, try as we might, we cannot will ourselves into perceiving these details. Similar with our sense of time, our grasp and use of language, memory, etc. These all exhibit a form of abstraction that suggests that consciousness sits farther away from the base processing of the brain than what your comment suggests. In my view, consciousness is kind of like the President of your brain. It doesn't see the full details of all the processing layers underneath; that would be overwhelming. It tries to make decisions and decrees and influence those subservient processes, but always along the chain of command there are those who have other ideas or intentions. So President Consciousness tries its best to steer the ship of hundreds, maybe thousands or millions, of diverse processes that are all loosely coupled. It doesn't see conditions on the ground, but always, always receives filtered reports that leave out details, get facts wrong, misrepresent and misconstrue. Think about dreaming. Ever had a dream that was astoundingly rich and detailed, either visually or spatially? When you heard music or speech in your dream, or saw a complex thing like a person, do you think that the lowest level processors of your brain literally experienced the same input as if they had received it from outside? Clearly not. Your eyes are closed. Nothing in the environment is making those sounds. How would you see anything or hear? There must be a kind of separation between the visual system which processes input from your eyes, and the system which constructs visual scenes, forms images, recognizes people, etc, because there simply is no raw input when you are asleep. So instead the scene-construction system and the audio classification system are working with "mock" data that is generated by other neural activity. How can consciousness be "off" while there is still brain activity? In fact, during most of sleep there is no experience whatsoever, no memories created, even though brain activity continues. A global workspace doesn't explain how consciousness can be suspended.

titzer 10y ago

I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. After all, think of it: you don't experience the regulation of your heartbeat or other autonomic functions, or the rods and cones detecting light in your eyes, or the individual variations in sound intensity that make up audio. Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Maybe bats just don't have that, so there is nothing that our consciousness can conceptualize that is similar to their very automatic behaviors.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
> I don't know for sure, but I kind of suspect that bats don't have any sort of analogous "consciousness program" in their brains like humans. They probably go through life very automatically, without a conception of self, without a reflection on their existence, very much like a person who sleepwalks is unconscious, but in a far dimmer way. The same probably goes for most animals, and certainly for insects and worms. Only advanced primates, dolphins, whales, elephants, and maybe some birds are likely to have "consciousness" programs that are in any way analogous to what you and I experience. Nah, I suspect that most mammals are conscious, emotive, and at least somewhat intelligent. But of course, I'd have to understand consciousness a lot better to really say! >Instead, you experience a very highly processed and organized show of sorts that is presented to your consciousness by many various brain subsystems. Studies have started to show that even the decisions we make are determined by the brain far before we are consciously aware. In some sense, consciousness is the story our brain tells itself while all the systems are off busy doing their things. Welll.... not really. Consciousness, AFAWK so far, is what happens when parallel sensorimotor systems sample a maximum-a-posteriori perceptual, interoceptive, and affordance model of the world into a global workspace where certain precise, mostly deterministic sampling computations can be done as a part of active inference to determine which actions to emit. Decisions aren't made ahead of time; (low-precision) affordances are computed ahead of time. It's not a show; it's the best model.
- titzer 10y ago
  > Welll.... not really. Consciousness, AFAWK so far, is what happens when parallel sensorimotor systems sample a maximum-a-posteriori perceptual, interoceptive, and affordance model of the world into a global workspace where certain precise, mostly deterministic sampling computations can be done as a part of active inference to determine which actions to emit. There seem to be some levels of abstraction here which I was trying to get at in my previous comment. Clearly we don't perceive the raw data of our sensory inputs getting dumped wholesale into our consciousness. We don't perceive the "pixels" of our eyes or the pressure of sound on our eardrum. That data is clearly processed by lower levels of the brain and turned into a more symbolic form. The visual system abstracts over the pixels, lines, borders, even shadows of visual input. The audio system recognizes pitch, volume, associates memory with patterns to classify sounds into churchbells, speech, scratching, animal sounds, music, etc. These things happen below the level of consciousness, since, try as we might, we cannot will ourselves into perceiving these details. Similar with our sense of time, our grasp and use of language, memory, etc. These all exhibit a form of abstraction that suggests that consciousness sits farther away from the base processing of the brain than what your comment suggests. In my view, consciousness is kind of like the President of your brain. It doesn't see the full details of all the processing layers underneath; that would be overwhelming. It tries to make decisions and decrees and influence those subservient processes, but always along the chain of command there are those who have other ideas or intentions. So President Consciousness tries its best to steer the ship of hundreds, maybe thousands or millions, of diverse processes that are all loosely coupled. It doesn't see conditions on the ground, but always, always receives filtered reports that leave out details, get facts wrong, misrepresent and misconstrue. Think about dreaming. Ever had a dream that was astoundingly rich and detailed, either visually or spatially? When you heard music or speech in your dream, or saw a complex thing like a person, do you think that the lowest level processors of your brain literally experienced the same input as if they had received it from outside? Clearly not. Your eyes are closed. Nothing in the environment is making those sounds. How would you see anything or hear? There must be a kind of separation between the visual system which processes input from your eyes, and the system which constructs visual scenes, forms images, recognizes people, etc, because there simply is no raw input when you are asleep. So instead the scene-construction system and the audio classification system are working with "mock" data that is generated by other neural activity. How can consciousness be "off" while there is still brain activity? In fact, during most of sleep there is no experience whatsoever, no memories created, even though brain activity continues. A global workspace doesn't explain how consciousness can be suspended.