16 ms·

What is it like to be a bat?

181 points by adityaathalye 1y ago

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

KolibriFly 1y ago
The fact that we can't bridge subjective and objective descriptions without hand-waving probably says more about the limits of human concepts than about bats
tim333 1y ago
Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?
- AIorNot 1y ago
  You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :) But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture
  - tim333 1y ago
    Though you could have like a slider control for more or less bat.
lenerdenator 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here.
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    Feels pretty substantive to me. Just because it's not what you were going for in relation to the discussion of that work doesn't mean it's unsubstantive. I approached it from the position Nagel brought up, which is reductive. They have life experiences that none of us can fathom, so we reduce it to what we know of them, which in my case is them living in my attic, much to my chagrin.
    - dang 1y ago
      People feel different things, of course, and it's all valid. Nonetheless, there's a standard that we're trying to adhere to here, and comments like these are certainly below it - not a borderline call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401
vehemenz 1y ago
I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
- ebb_earl_co 1y ago
  What brought down your level on convinced?
  - vehemenz 1y ago
    When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      This definition is a special metaphysical thing.
    - dimal 1y ago
      I don’t read Nagel as rejecting the idea of reductionism as strongly as you suggest. He’s simply calling out its limitations with regard to subjective experience. Why does it imply that “everything is on the same level”?
    - glenstein 1y ago
      >When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism. >Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.
scubakid 1y ago
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.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  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.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    > 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.
    - kelseyfrog 1y ago
      I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as > It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data. There are specific failure cases for non-integrability: 1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing. 2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat. 3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible. At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
adityaathalye 1y ago
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.” — Kurt Vonnegut In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human. The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.
- jm__87 1y ago
  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, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
  - adityaathalye 1y ago
    https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
    - cl3misch 1y ago
      That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!
      - AIorNot 1y ago
        You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true (Warning: Gets into spiritual stuff) https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g
mistidoi 1y ago
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-to-be-batfished/ https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
- nsriv 1y ago
  I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
    - parpfish 1y ago
      Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
      - dmurray 1y ago
        No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good. Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse. That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
card_zero 1y ago
Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat: Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill! He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
- antonvs 1y ago
  What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing? Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
  - card_zero 1y ago
    The pessimism, the "facts beyond the reach of human concepts".
    - antonvs 1y ago
      That's not pessimism. It's interrogating the nature of reality. If you want to discover truth, you can't shy away from conclusions because they don't make you feel good.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    It gives obvious examples of the way our awareness of factual circumstances give us inroads into what might be experienced. And the upshot is that this might suggest the rest of consciousness can be understood by iterating forward in a similar manner. Dennett makes this exact same point about Mary's Room. Far from talking past the article, it's attacking the fundamental principle.
bee_rider 1y ago
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers. I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer. Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
- snowram 1y ago
  Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    > 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)
    - PreHistoricPunk 1y ago
      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.
  - glenstein 1y ago
    It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning). I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.
iLemming 1y ago
The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems" How it at all related to let's say programming? Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative. Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects. These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming. It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception. When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints. This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it. The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program. There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc. The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
- 1y ago
wagwang 1y ago
Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism. Exhibit a > Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
- vehemenz 1y ago
  > Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    They have different probabilities as they require different fine tuning. Sorted by fine tuning: physicalism < simulation < idealism < dualism < solipsism.
- adityaathalye 1y ago
  If anything, it's getting weirder... real progress looks, well, batshit insane. For example: Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY
- jibal 1y ago
  > 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.
  - geye1234 1y ago
    One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical. It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
bettating 1y ago
What is it like to be another person?
- esafak 1y ago
  I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
  - jibal 1y ago
    I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.
    - vehemenz 1y ago
      What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?
      - jibal 1y ago
        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.
        vehemenz 1y ago
        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.
bondarchuk 1y ago
>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism." IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
- trescenzi 1y ago
  There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
  - bondarchuk 1y ago
    >Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing. That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
    - trescenzi 1y ago
      So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
      - mensetmanusman 1y ago
        Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.
Der_Einzige 1y ago
Daniel Dennett was the only good part of the "New Atheism" movement. May he rest in peace.
- vehemenz 1y ago
  The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.
o_nate 1y ago
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words: "How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. “If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had. - Xenophanes, ~500 BCE <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38174-Xenophanes https://www.azquotes.com/author/38174-Xenophanes>
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samirillian 1y ago
Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.
RS-232 1y ago
Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated. Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience. Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable. So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
- the_af 1y ago
  > Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience. If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here? How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
- curiousguy7374 1y ago
  But I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    There is a soul if you believe we aren’t all p-zombies. (Soul is the all encompassing word to distinguish this. Maybe there are better words?)
dang 1y ago
Related. Others? What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments) A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)
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nomilk 1y ago
> Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." Struggling to make sense of this sentence.
- padjo 1y ago
  I wouldn’t bother.
- PreHistoricPunk 1y ago
  It means that if something has conscious mental states then it must have subjective experience from its own perspective. If John has a conscious mental state, then I must be able to ask "What is it like to be John?". Hope that helps.
- AlexResi 1y ago
  An organism is conscious exactly when there is something it is like for that organism to be itself. Or in a simpler way, consciousness is present just in case being that organism has an inner, subjective character - something that can not be reduced to a purely material state.
MollyRealized 1y ago
Answer: You are a creature of the night, terrible, able to strike terror into a superstitious, cowardly lot.
edbaskerville 1y ago
Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up. I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batman https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  > Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight. In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    > In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, What do you mean by that distinction?
    - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
      If you contrast vision and hearing, vision is about things with spatial extent (the 2-D/3-D scene you are looking at), and I think the subjective experience of visual attributes like color comes directly from that - color being fundamentally a spatial attribute that differentiates surfaces (as you scan your eyes around), with this providing a common base quale of experiencing any color - the experience of a sensed attribute that changes, or not, as we scan a scene. In contrast, hearing is a temporal sense primarily about temporal sequences of changing patterns of sensed frequencies, and we experience this as sensed attributes that change, or not, over time (and which may surprise us, or not, by matching previously experienced temporal sequences). I think echolocation is more like vision in this regard, perhaps more like the flashlight example, but an input that varies spatially rather than temporally.
btown 1y ago
My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0]. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking. At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture? What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind? Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope. While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355 https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
- KolibriFly 1y ago
  I like your point that translation isn't just technical, it's political. Every attempt to "bridge the gap" shapes power as much as it conveys meaning
daoboy 1y ago
Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand. "It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
socrateswasone 1y ago
It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.
- AIorNot 1y ago
  Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
  - socrateswasone 1y ago
    You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit. Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?
    - glenstein 1y ago
      >Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses. I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.
protocolture 1y ago
Bandit: "Hey, Bluey! You're a fruit bat!" Bluey: "Yeah!" Bandit: "How is it?" Bluey: "It's great! You get to eat a lot of fruit!"
tgbugs 1y ago
I'm going to ignore the issues of mind/body dualism since they are orthogonal to the argument I want to make about Nagel's bat. The short version is that if we can approximate the sensory experience and the motor experience of an organism, and we can successively refine that approximation as measured by similarity in behavior between bat and man-bad, then I would argue that we can in fact imagine what it is like to be a bat. In short, it is a Chinese Bat Room argument. If you put a human controlling a robot bat and a bat in two boxes and then ask someone to determine which is the human and which is the bat, when science can no longer tell the difference (because we have refined the human/bat interface sufficiently) you can ask the human controlling the robot bat to write down their experience and it would be strikingly similar to what the bat would say if we could teach it English. The bat case is actually easier than one might suppose, similarly say, a jumping spider, because we can translate their sensory inputs to our nervous system and if we tune our reward system and motor system so that we can get even an approximate set of inputs and similar set of actuators, then we can experience what it is like to be a bat. Further, if I improve the fidelity of the experimental man-bat simulation rig, the experience will likewise converge. While we will not be able to truly be a bat since that is asymptotically mutually exclusive with our biology, the fact that we can build systems that allow progressive approach to bat sensory motor experience means that we actually do have the ability to image the experience of other beings. That is, our experiences are converging and differ only due to our lack of our technical ability to overcome the limitations of our biological differences. The harder case is when we literally don't have the molecule that is used to detect something, as in the tetrachormat case. That said one of my friends has always wanted to find a way to do an experiment where a trichromat can somehow have the new photo receptor expressed in one eye and see what happens. The general argument about why we would expect something similar to happen should the technical hurdles be overcome is because basically all nervous systems wire themselves up by learning. Therefore, as long as the input and output ranges can be mapped to something that a human can learn, then a human nervous system should likewise converge to be able to sense and produce those inputs and outputs (modulo certain critical periods in neural development, though even those can be overcome, e.g. language acquisition by slowing down speech for adults). Some technical hurdle examples. Converting a trichromat into a tetrachormat by crispering someone's left eye. Learning dolphin by slowing down dolphin speech in time while also providing a way for humans to produce dolphin high frequency speech via some transform on the human orofacial vocal system. There are limitations when we can't literally dilate time, but I supposed if we are going all the way, we can accelerate the human to the fraction of the speed of light that will compensate for the fact that the human motor system can't quite operate fast enough to allow a rapid fire conversation with a dolphin.
safety-space 1y ago
Science studies the physical and measurable. Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That’s why the “hard problem” sits outside what science, by definition, can explain.
- glenstein 1y ago
  >Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That's just a question begging assertion, and there's plenty of empirical knowledge of necessary physical conditions for consciousness as well as predictable physical influences on conscious states. Whether consciousness is "measurable" is part of what's at issue and can't just be definitionally presupposed.
anon-3988 1y ago
If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. Yet that is not so common. There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another. There is only is and its content. That's it. The easiest way to see or get a sense of this is to replace any "I am ..." with "There is a ....". For example, instead of "I am thinking of writing of using stable sort", replace it with "This person have a thought of using stable sort". This is much closer to the actual reality underneath. Even attachment itself can be put in this term. "There's a feeling that this person own this" or "There's a sense of I". After doing, perhaps this is mental illness, I already see glimpse of the sense that everything is everything at the same time. As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see. There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people. Now your sense of self captures the entirety of the universe. If you die, the universe dies for all you know. I think this is what the ancient books have been talking about by rising and being a God.
- selcuka 1y ago
  > If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. It depends on your definition of "dualism". If you define it as "having a soul that was created by a higher being", then yes, they are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, one can also define dualism as being purely evolutionary. David Chalmers [1], an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, has some interesting ideas around how dualistic consciousness may relate to quantum mechanics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
- fsckboy 1y ago
  >There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another. what's it like to be a human? "There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." -- anon-3988 it does?
  - 1y ago
m463 1y ago
The bat article might be a more philosophical treatise... But it makes me think of this article: https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html which is a more concrete(?) dive into being an animal?
dwd 1y ago
Anil Seth recently wrote a book "Being You", which very much states that we can only know what it is like to be ourselves. Basically, to know what it is like to be a bat, you need to have evolved as a bat. His theory that our perception is a hallucination generated by a prediction algorithm that uses sensory input to update and correct the hallucination is very interesting.
hsod 1y ago
Douglas Hofstadter wrote an essay about this essay in the book “The Mind’s I” which I thoroughly enjoyed reading even if a lot of it is beyond me. There’s a somewhat janky OCR version here http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-like-to-be-bat.html?m=1 http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l... Classic Hofstadter, he introduces a concept called a “Be-Able Thing” (BAT for short)
IAmGraydon 1y ago
>An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. Isn’t this just the same as saying an organism is conscious if it perceives? If it is aware of input from one or more senses (and I’m not limiting that to the five human senses)?
mjcohen 1y ago
As Disney almost wrote: Everybody wants to be a bat Cause noone but a bat really knows where it's at
bave8672 1y ago
Related - Charles Foster has put perhaps the most effort of any individual to try to really understand what it's like to live as an animal. From the blurb or 'Being a Beast': > He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Foster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Foster
deleted 1y ago
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tooheavy 1y ago
Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.
- dghf 1y ago
  Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything. If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that. And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.
- Ukv 1y ago
  IMO a lot of this comes from still holding onto the dualist idea of "I" as a separate non-physical entity, and then expecting some region of the brain to act as a link or communication channel to it. > If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. Materialism doesn't say that there's some "I" that could experience different persons. I think the best you could do, in theory, is transplant aspects like your personality/train of thought/memories into someone else's brain (by physically altering it to have those aspects).
epiphenomenal 1y ago
I think I wrote a whole book around this. :)) Feel free to reach out at theillusionengine@gmail.com for a draft :) https://illusionengine.xyz/ https://illusionengine.xyz/ :)
- visarga 1y ago
  Interesting topic, but I can only see one chapter. Based on chapter names it seems you lean closer to cybernetics or process philosophy. Is that true? I find ignoring time and process to be the greatest sin in the field of consciousness. The big issue is not that we don't know the quantum trick or property-dualism that explains consciousness, but that we try to remove time and process from it. That is impossible, a static explanation will never capture dynamic execution of a system. I worked on similar topics, I publish on a "personal" subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/
  - epiphenomenal 1y ago
    Cybernetics is behind all modern AI (Turing was a cyberneticist), and also modern cognitive science with the ideas close to hybrid computing, neuromorphic computing, enactivism, embodied minds etc. Basically, cyberneticists were functionalists - and that allows for multiple realizability. At the core of the book is the question of consciousness and qualia (and I do believe that a walkthrough through computational complexity is necessary, especially taking into account TIME and SPACE for both human neural processing and artificial one, differentiating between being incomputable in principle, being incomputable in practice or being tractable.
ulrischa 1y ago
He anticipated an AI problem decades early. Replace “bat” with “LLM” or “alien intelligence,” and the paper reads like a warning: describing behavior and mechanisms might never reveal the inner feel, if there is one, to outsiders.
myrmidon 1y ago
Echolocation for humans 101: Close eyes, make short impulse-like noise (tapping of feet can be sufficient, or snip fingers), and move slowly. You will find that not running into walls is pretty easy. Feedback, to me, feels like light pressure on my face. But this sense can be trained a lot; object detection and mapping your proximity is feasible for trained humans, and presumably changes the perception.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Our hearing is more sensitive than we give it credit for being. We used to play a game in my dojo where we'd toss a "knife" (wooden) around in a circle, as if sending it to an ally. Yes, you could throw it in a way that can't be caught... but then the person picks it up and chooses how to throw it back. You learn quickly not to be a dick about it. Naturally, we were trying to get better at catching, and eventually moved to a trust version, where I shout "Go!" as I throw the knife. Turns out you can hear the knife leaving someone's hands more reliably than they can shout "Go!" on time.

181 points by adityaathalye 1y ago

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

KolibriFly 1y ago

The fact that we can't bridge subjective and objective descriptions without hand-waving probably says more about the limits of human concepts than about bats

tim333 1y ago

Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?

AIorNot 1y ago
You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :) But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture
- tim333 1y ago
  Though you could have like a slider control for more or less bat.

lenerdenator 1y ago

[flagged]

dang 1y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  Feels pretty substantive to me. Just because it's not what you were going for in relation to the discussion of that work doesn't mean it's unsubstantive. I approached it from the position Nagel brought up, which is reductive. They have life experiences that none of us can fathom, so we reduce it to what we know of them, which in my case is them living in my attic, much to my chagrin.
  - dang 1y ago
    People feel different things, of course, and it's all valid. Nonetheless, there's a standard that we're trying to adhere to here, and comments like these are certainly below it - not a borderline call: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45115367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111401

vehemenz 1y ago

I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.

ebb_earl_co 1y ago
What brought down your level on convinced?
- vehemenz 1y ago
  When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    This definition is a special metaphysical thing.
  - dimal 1y ago
    I don’t read Nagel as rejecting the idea of reductionism as strongly as you suggest. He’s simply calling out its limitations with regard to subjective experience. Why does it imply that “everything is on the same level”?
  - glenstein 1y ago
    >When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism. >Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.

scubakid 1y ago

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.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
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.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  > 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.
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as > It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data. There are specific failure cases for non-integrability: 1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing. 2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat. 3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible. At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.

adityaathalye 1y ago

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.” — Kurt Vonnegut In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human. The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.

jm__87 1y ago
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, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
- adityaathalye 1y ago
  https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
  - cl3misch 1y ago
    That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!
    - AIorNot 1y ago
      You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true (Warning: Gets into spiritual stuff) https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g

mistidoi 1y ago

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-to-be-batfished/ https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...

nsriv 1y ago
I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
  - parpfish 1y ago
    Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
    - dmurray 1y ago
      No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good. Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse. That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.

card_zero 1y ago

Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat: Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill! He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.

antonvs 1y ago
What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing? Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
- card_zero 1y ago
  The pessimism, the "facts beyond the reach of human concepts".
  - antonvs 1y ago
    That's not pessimism. It's interrogating the nature of reality. If you want to discover truth, you can't shy away from conclusions because they don't make you feel good.
- glenstein 1y ago
  It gives obvious examples of the way our awareness of factual circumstances give us inroads into what might be experienced. And the upshot is that this might suggest the rest of consciousness can be understood by iterating forward in a similar manner. Dennett makes this exact same point about Mary's Room. Far from talking past the article, it's attacking the fundamental principle.

bee_rider 1y ago

Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers. I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer. Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”

snowram 1y ago
Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.
- card_zero 1y ago
  > 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)
  - PreHistoricPunk 1y ago
    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.
- glenstein 1y ago
  It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning). I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.

iLemming 1y ago

The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems" How it at all related to let's say programming? Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative. Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects. These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming. It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception. When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints. This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it. The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program. There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc. The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.

1y ago

wagwang 1y ago

Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism. Exhibit a > Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".

vehemenz 1y ago
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  They have different probabilities as they require different fine tuning. Sorted by fine tuning: physicalism < simulation < idealism < dualism < solipsism.
adityaathalye 1y ago
If anything, it's getting weirder... real progress looks, well, batshit insane. For example: Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY
jibal 1y ago
> 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.
- geye1234 1y ago
  One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical. It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.

bettating 1y ago

What is it like to be another person?

esafak 1y ago
I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
- jibal 1y ago
  I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.
  - vehemenz 1y ago
    What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?
    - jibal 1y ago
      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.
      - vehemenz 1y ago
        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.

bondarchuk 1y ago

>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism." IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.

trescenzi 1y ago
There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
- bondarchuk 1y ago
  >Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing. That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
  - trescenzi 1y ago
    So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.

Der_Einzige 1y ago

Daniel Dennett was the only good part of the "New Atheism" movement. May he rest in peace.

vehemenz 1y ago
The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.

o_nate 1y ago

The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words: "How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)

dredmorbius 1y ago
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. “If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had. - Xenophanes, ~500 BCE <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38174-Xenophanes https://www.azquotes.com/author/38174-Xenophanes>

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samirillian 1y ago

Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.

RS-232 1y ago

Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated. Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience. Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable. So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?

the_af 1y ago
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience. If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here? How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
curiousguy7374 1y ago
But I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  There is a soul if you believe we aren’t all p-zombies. (Soul is the all encompassing word to distinguish this. Maybe there are better words?)

dang 1y ago

Related. Others? What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments) A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)

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nomilk 1y ago

> Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." Struggling to make sense of this sentence.

padjo 1y ago
I wouldn’t bother.
PreHistoricPunk 1y ago
It means that if something has conscious mental states then it must have subjective experience from its own perspective. If John has a conscious mental state, then I must be able to ask "What is it like to be John?". Hope that helps.
AlexResi 1y ago
An organism is conscious exactly when there is something it is like for that organism to be itself. Or in a simpler way, consciousness is present just in case being that organism has an inner, subjective character - something that can not be reduced to a purely material state.

MollyRealized 1y ago

Answer: You are a creature of the night, terrible, able to strike terror into a superstitious, cowardly lot.

edbaskerville 1y ago

Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up. I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-become-batman https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight. In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  > In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, What do you mean by that distinction?
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    If you contrast vision and hearing, vision is about things with spatial extent (the 2-D/3-D scene you are looking at), and I think the subjective experience of visual attributes like color comes directly from that - color being fundamentally a spatial attribute that differentiates surfaces (as you scan your eyes around), with this providing a common base quale of experiencing any color - the experience of a sensed attribute that changes, or not, as we scan a scene. In contrast, hearing is a temporal sense primarily about temporal sequences of changing patterns of sensed frequencies, and we experience this as sensed attributes that change, or not, over time (and which may surprise us, or not, by matching previously experienced temporal sequences). I think echolocation is more like vision in this regard, perhaps more like the flashlight example, but an input that varies spatially rather than temporally.

btown 1y ago

My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0]. It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking. At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture? What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind? Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope. While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536355 https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism

KolibriFly 1y ago
I like your point that translation isn't just technical, it's political. Every attempt to "bridge the gap" shapes power as much as it conveys meaning

daoboy 1y ago

Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand. "It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."

socrateswasone 1y ago

It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.

AIorNot 1y ago
Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
- socrateswasone 1y ago
  You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit. Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?
  - glenstein 1y ago
    >Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process I don't think "mind" is limited to those two things, and I think it may be on a continuum rather than binary, and they may also be integrally related to the having of other senses. I also think they probably do have some non trivial degree of mind even in the strong sense, and that mental states that aren't immediately tied to self reflection are independently valuable because even mere "sense perceptions" include valenced states (pain, comfort) that traditionally tend to fall within the scope of moral consideration. I also think their stake in future modes of being over their long term evolutionary trajectory is a morally significant interest they have.

protocolture 1y ago

Bandit: "Hey, Bluey! You're a fruit bat!" Bluey: "Yeah!" Bandit: "How is it?" Bluey: "It's great! You get to eat a lot of fruit!"

tgbugs 1y ago

I'm going to ignore the issues of mind/body dualism since they are orthogonal to the argument I want to make about Nagel's bat. The short version is that if we can approximate the sensory experience and the motor experience of an organism, and we can successively refine that approximation as measured by similarity in behavior between bat and man-bad, then I would argue that we can in fact imagine what it is like to be a bat. In short, it is a Chinese Bat Room argument. If you put a human controlling a robot bat and a bat in two boxes and then ask someone to determine which is the human and which is the bat, when science can no longer tell the difference (because we have refined the human/bat interface sufficiently) you can ask the human controlling the robot bat to write down their experience and it would be strikingly similar to what the bat would say if we could teach it English. The bat case is actually easier than one might suppose, similarly say, a jumping spider, because we can translate their sensory inputs to our nervous system and if we tune our reward system and motor system so that we can get even an approximate set of inputs and similar set of actuators, then we can experience what it is like to be a bat. Further, if I improve the fidelity of the experimental man-bat simulation rig, the experience will likewise converge. While we will not be able to truly be a bat since that is asymptotically mutually exclusive with our biology, the fact that we can build systems that allow progressive approach to bat sensory motor experience means that we actually do have the ability to image the experience of other beings. That is, our experiences are converging and differ only due to our lack of our technical ability to overcome the limitations of our biological differences. The harder case is when we literally don't have the molecule that is used to detect something, as in the tetrachormat case. That said one of my friends has always wanted to find a way to do an experiment where a trichromat can somehow have the new photo receptor expressed in one eye and see what happens. The general argument about why we would expect something similar to happen should the technical hurdles be overcome is because basically all nervous systems wire themselves up by learning. Therefore, as long as the input and output ranges can be mapped to something that a human can learn, then a human nervous system should likewise converge to be able to sense and produce those inputs and outputs (modulo certain critical periods in neural development, though even those can be overcome, e.g. language acquisition by slowing down speech for adults). Some technical hurdle examples. Converting a trichromat into a tetrachormat by crispering someone's left eye. Learning dolphin by slowing down dolphin speech in time while also providing a way for humans to produce dolphin high frequency speech via some transform on the human orofacial vocal system. There are limitations when we can't literally dilate time, but I supposed if we are going all the way, we can accelerate the human to the fraction of the speed of light that will compensate for the fact that the human motor system can't quite operate fast enough to allow a rapid fire conversation with a dolphin.

safety-space 1y ago

Science studies the physical and measurable. Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That’s why the “hard problem” sits outside what science, by definition, can explain.

glenstein 1y ago
>Consciousness isn’t physical or measurable. That's just a question begging assertion, and there's plenty of empirical knowledge of necessary physical conditions for consciousness as well as predictable physical influences on conscious states. Whether consciousness is "measurable" is part of what's at issue and can't just be definitionally presupposed.

anon-3988 1y ago

If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. Yet that is not so common. There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another. There is only is and its content. That's it. The easiest way to see or get a sense of this is to replace any "I am ..." with "There is a ....". For example, instead of "I am thinking of writing of using stable sort", replace it with "This person have a thought of using stable sort". This is much closer to the actual reality underneath. Even attachment itself can be put in this term. "There's a feeling that this person own this" or "There's a sense of I". After doing, perhaps this is mental illness, I already see glimpse of the sense that everything is everything at the same time. As there are no real difference between this rock and the other rock behind the mountain that I can't see. There should be no difference between my thoughts, senses, feelings, emotions etc and that of other people. Now your sense of self captures the entirety of the universe. If you die, the universe dies for all you know. I think this is what the ancient books have been talking about by rising and being a God.

selcuka 1y ago
> If you are a secular person, it should follow that you are a non-dualist. It depends on your definition of "dualism". If you define it as "having a soul that was created by a higher being", then yes, they are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, one can also define dualism as being purely evolutionary. David Chalmers [1], an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, has some interesting ideas around how dualistic consciousness may relate to quantum mechanics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
fsckboy 1y ago
>There's no "whats its like to be a bat". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another. what's it like to be a human? "There's no "whats its like to be a human". Because that invokes a sense of a "soul" or "spirit" or "self" being transferred from one being to another." -- anon-3988 it does?
- 1y ago

m463 1y ago

The bat article might be a more philosophical treatise... But it makes me think of this article: https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html which is a more concrete(?) dive into being an animal?

dwd 1y ago

Anil Seth recently wrote a book "Being You", which very much states that we can only know what it is like to be ourselves. Basically, to know what it is like to be a bat, you need to have evolved as a bat. His theory that our perception is a hallucination generated by a prediction algorithm that uses sensory input to update and correct the hallucination is very interesting.

hsod 1y ago

Douglas Hofstadter wrote an essay about this essay in the book “The Mind’s I” which I thoroughly enjoyed reading even if a lot of it is beyond me. There’s a somewhat janky OCR version here http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-like-to-be-bat.html?m=1 http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l... Classic Hofstadter, he introduces a concept called a “Be-Able Thing” (BAT for short)

IAmGraydon 1y ago

>An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. Isn’t this just the same as saying an organism is conscious if it perceives? If it is aware of input from one or more senses (and I’m not limiting that to the five human senses)?

mjcohen 1y ago

As Disney almost wrote: Everybody wants to be a bat Cause noone but a bat really knows where it's at

bave8672 1y ago

Related - Charles Foster has put perhaps the most effort of any individual to try to really understand what it's like to live as an animal. From the blurb or 'Being a Beast': > He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Foster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._Foster

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tooheavy 1y ago

Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.

dghf 1y ago
Contrarily, the problem I have with non-materialist/physicalist explanations is that they don't really seem to explain anything. If we assume dualism, that there is some non-material stuff -- call it soul or spirit or mind or psyche or whatever -- that gives rise to consciousness, I think it's fair to ask how it does that. And if the answer is "we don't know" or "it just does", I really can't see what we've gained over materialism.
Ukv 1y ago
IMO a lot of this comes from still holding onto the dualist idea of "I" as a separate non-physical entity, and then expecting some region of the brain to act as a link or communication channel to it. > If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. Materialism doesn't say that there's some "I" that could experience different persons. I think the best you could do, in theory, is transplant aspects like your personality/train of thought/memories into someone else's brain (by physically altering it to have those aspects).

epiphenomenal 1y ago

I think I wrote a whole book around this. :)) Feel free to reach out at theillusionengine@gmail.com for a draft :) https://illusionengine.xyz/ https://illusionengine.xyz/ :)

visarga 1y ago
Interesting topic, but I can only see one chapter. Based on chapter names it seems you lean closer to cybernetics or process philosophy. Is that true? I find ignoring time and process to be the greatest sin in the field of consciousness. The big issue is not that we don't know the quantum trick or property-dualism that explains consciousness, but that we try to remove time and process from it. That is impossible, a static explanation will never capture dynamic execution of a system. I worked on similar topics, I publish on a "personal" subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VisargaPersonal/
- epiphenomenal 1y ago
  Cybernetics is behind all modern AI (Turing was a cyberneticist), and also modern cognitive science with the ideas close to hybrid computing, neuromorphic computing, enactivism, embodied minds etc. Basically, cyberneticists were functionalists - and that allows for multiple realizability. At the core of the book is the question of consciousness and qualia (and I do believe that a walkthrough through computational complexity is necessary, especially taking into account TIME and SPACE for both human neural processing and artificial one, differentiating between being incomputable in principle, being incomputable in practice or being tractable.

ulrischa 1y ago

He anticipated an AI problem decades early. Replace “bat” with “LLM” or “alien intelligence,” and the paper reads like a warning: describing behavior and mechanisms might never reveal the inner feel, if there is one, to outsiders.

myrmidon 1y ago

Echolocation for humans 101: Close eyes, make short impulse-like noise (tapping of feet can be sufficient, or snip fingers), and move slowly. You will find that not running into walls is pretty easy. Feedback, to me, feels like light pressure on my face. But this sense can be trained a lot; object detection and mapping your proximity is feasible for trained humans, and presumably changes the perception.

IAmBroom 1y ago
Our hearing is more sensitive than we give it credit for being. We used to play a game in my dojo where we'd toss a "knife" (wooden) around in a circle, as if sending it to an ally. Yes, you could throw it in a way that can't be caught... but then the person picks it up and chooses how to throw it back. You learn quickly not to be a dick about it. Naturally, we were trying to get better at catching, and eventually moved to a trust version, where I shout "Go!" as I throw the knife. Turns out you can hear the knife leaving someone's hands more reliably than they can shout "Go!" on time.