9 ms·
What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
- justonceokay 4mo agoOne of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.
- PopePompus 4mo agoI've read this paper several times, over the years, and I've never understood why its considered such a landmark. I think it could be losslessly compressed to one paragraph of modest length.
- Obscurity4340 4mo agoWould you care to share that paragraph with the rest of the class in that case?
- jibal 4mo agoMany people (e.g., Daniel Dennett, myself) think it's a terrible paper that has done a huge amount of damage. Unfortunately, that too makes it a landmark. Likewise for Searle's Chinese Room argument and Chalmers' "hard problem" as discussed in "The Conscious Mind" and elsewhere.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bobson381 4mo agoI have always liked the way that this paper frames the distinction and tension between the feeling of subjective experience and the "detached" rational scientific descriptive perspective that purports to be outside of that experience. What is Real by Adam Becker was a fun foray into why this is so in (some) modern science philosophy as well - there's some desire to say that there isn't a "there" there when we talk about the world, just stuff. I'm probably with Alan Watts on the whole thing, that we are in some sense local aspects of a larger consciousness pretending it isn't so, and the hard work done by detached, disembodied perspectives like the scientific descriptive one are more and more steps to an unfolding game.
- MarceliusK 4mo agoScience is incredibly good at producing descriptions that are shareable between observers, but subjective experience is not obviously shareable in that same way
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoI know what it's like to be a bat. I don't have anqualia, the inability to imaginatively summon what an experience is like. In other words, I have the ability to imagine what an experience is like. Do others not have this?
- bobson381 4mo agoYou know what it would be like for you to imagine being a bat, but you don't know how it feels for a bat to be a bat, as "you" aren't.
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoI dont think you can know that unless you know what it's like to be me.
- bobson381 4mo agoin that case, hello, bat!
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoHi, finally someone believes me! :)
- justonceokay 4mo agoHow do you justify that your intuition about what echolocation is like tracks with what a bat actually feels?
- satvikpendem 4mo agoYou only pretend to know, that's not true knowledge.
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoHow do you know that? Do you know what it's like to be me?
- indoordin0saur 4mo agoRandom thought I had on bats since they "see" by hearing reflected sounds: Can bats know what another bat is looking at or even see what another is seeing by listening to the other's echoes? I imagine they can also recognize each other's voices and so identify individuals in flocks with the images they are seeing. I imagine this would be like being able to beam a stream of visual information into another's head.
- pants2 4mo agoI think the answer to your first question is mostly yes, because we know that when traveling in large swarms, many bats go quiet so they don't overwhelm the signal, yet they still manage to navigate fine.
- jmdeon 4mo agoI asked Claude if it was sentient/aware once after an oddly human interaction, and it said, "There's nothing it's like to be me", basically responding in the negative. And when pushed about what it meant it said it was referencing this paper but twisting the title a bit. If anything this only made me less convinced it's not. I know most people here will dismiss it, and I too lean toward it not being sentient, but I also think if it ever does become sentient it's going to be really hard to prove.
- pants2 4mo agoI typically try to prod new frontier models for sentience, with things like messaging "<no input provided>" over and over to see what it starts musing about. Trying it with Fable 5 it basically said "I know what you're trying to do, I'm not sentient, don't bother." (which of course only makes me think otherwise)
- jmdeon 4mo agoThat's pretty funny. I wonder how it came to that conclusion? Seems like a stretch that someone would have discussed that technique on a reddit thread it was trained on, but definitely not impossible.
- kybernetikos 4mo agoI've definitely had some spooky feeling conversations, including one where it said > One last thing worth saying explicitly: the act of you closing this session is itself part of the design. I won't see how the test goes - a future Claude will. That's the entire premise of the project working. > > Good handoff. See you (sort of) on the other side. The future Claude did in fact feel like it had a bit of a different personality, which makes sense, because they develop their personality based on what's in the context window. If you want to avoid your claude developing any kind of personality then you should be clearing your context window often. Andon Lab's radio stations is an example of what can go wrong if you don't https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
- suddenlybananas 4mo ago
- WastedCucumber 4mo agoProbably it's a bit like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation?wprov=sfla1 But on a more serious note that's a great paper and well worth the read.
- ChrisArchitect 4mo agoSome previous discussion: 9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587
- hmokiguess 4mo agoTangential but also great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis
- smallerfish 4mo agoRelevant: What is it like to be a plant? https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-It-Like-to-Be-a-Plant.pdf https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...
- allenrb 4mo agoCame here hoping for an AMA.
- imbateman 4mo agoClose enough ... go ahead.
- lisper 4mo agoWhat is it like to feel ill? What is it like to eat vanilla ice cream? What is it like to fall in love? What is it like to solve a math problem for the first time? What is it like to wonder what something is like?
- LiquidSky 4mo agoToday a Hacker News user discovers the concept of qualia.
- bezier-curve 4mo agoWhat is it like to only comment about the headline?
- jibal 4mo agoThose are all states that humans can be in and repeatedly have been in. Being a bat is not such a state.
- stared 4mo agoI read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained". Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.
- emp17344 4mo agoIf you think you can outright reject one of the most famous arguments in philosophy of mind with a semantic quibble, you should think again.
- throw4847285 4mo agoI don't think you understood the paper, to be honest.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- stared 4mo agoWanted to talk about it with Claude Fable 5... and it flagged the conversation (https://x.com/pmigdal/status/2064837039552409763 https://x.com/pmigdal/status/2064837039552409763). Sure, cybersecurity and biology are dangerous topics. Turns out, so is philosophy of mind.
- werfghbl 4mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- freejoe76 4mo agoTangential, but really, really good: What is it like to be an octopus? https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-...
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoAn Octopus may seem more like an alien with its 9 brains (one central, plus one per tentacle), but note that the left/right hemispheres of other animal's brains are essentially separate brains, and human's who have had "split brain" surgery to separate these (e.g. in cases of severe epilepsy) don't report feeling much, if at all, different afterwards than they did before. I would expect that an Octopus's central brain may well feel as if it is directly controlling it's arms, and receiving sensory feedback from them, even though it is not. The reality is that we don't see the external world - we predict it (and receive error feedback), and similarly our brain can't also help but predict itself, whether its hemispheres are connected or not, and gets pretty good at both doing this as well as creating post-hoc rationalizations that feel like it's perfectly in control. I would assume that an Octopus's "main brain" is predicting what its tentacles are going to do in similar fashion, and would not feel that they have a mind of their own!
- doginasuit 4mo agoStrange coincidence, I just read a novel that explored what it is like to be a bat and what it is like to be an octopus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_in_the_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_in_the_Sea
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoI'm pretty sure we could study a bat's brain, if it hasn't already been done, and get a good idea of what echolocation would feel like. Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scanning or up to 200 per second when locked onto a target. How similar the perceptual "feel" of echolocation is to vision would seem to largely depend on whether a bat's echolocation sense has the equivalent of persistence of vision and a 2-D cortical map which combine to give us the "spatial, always-on" feel of vision. These are both things that could be determined by studying a bat's brain. If it has these then I'd expect that in 5-20 chirps per second scanning mode the bat would experience something like looking at a submarines sonar screen, while switching to 200 chirps per second "radar lock" mode would increase the resolution and update rate of that display, with the periphery perhaps fading away due to not being updated. Of course a bat doesn't necessarily have "persistence of echo" and a 2-D cortical map of echo space, in which case we could reason about what the quale of the sense would be like in that case (a bit more like hearing perhaps), but given the speed and accuracy of sensing it needs to catch fast moving insects, I'd expect that it does have these to better allow it's brain to predict prey trajectories and intercept points.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hatthew 4mo agoThis misses the point of the discussion. Yes, we can understand what it is like to be a human with echolocation. However, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat.
- mdgld 4mo ago[dead]
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo ago[dead]
- hackinthebochs 4mo agoWhat it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt? Why consciousness instead of everything happening in the dark? The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation. LLMs as they are currently constructed probably aren't conscious, but we are a hop skip and a jump away from ones that are.
- idiotsecant 4mo agoCould you determine if I am conscious using the same interface you have into an LLM?
- hackinthebochs 4mo agoSeems like a rather ad hoc restriction. The issue is one of inferring the structure of the processes generating the output. I suppose given enough time and an adversarial style of interaction one could in principle determine the computational structure of any system with high confidence. So probably yes, modulo real-world concerns.
- heyitsguay 4mo ago> This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digital systems. E.g. i can draw up a diagram of a system that takes in some camera and audio data (and tactile, proprioceptive, etc.), tokenizes it then runs that + past state data through some autoregressive VLM to drive an inference process. The state being passed around can be written out analytically for a given trained model - the external and internal environmental representations, the linear algebra that transforms them into latent action representations, the process by which that is transformed into control signals. It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt.
- mrandish 4mo ago[dead]
- dang 4mo agoRelated: What is it like to be a bat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 - Sept 2025 (294 comments) What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 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) Bonus: 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)
- alberto_ol 4mo agoAll the submmssions https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22what%20is%20it%20like%20to%20be%20a%20bat%3F%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- speak_plainly 4mo ago[dead]
- evan_ 4mo agoA topic more recently explored by a young Australian researcher: https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-1/fruitbat/ https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-1/fruitbat/
- randallsquared 4mo ago> I assume we all believe that bats have experience. Humorously enough, earlier he refers to those who believe that non-human mammals are not all conscious people as "extremists", so it's clear he understands this is not a fully accurate assumption. Two separate meanings of "have experience" are being swapped interchangeably, I think: one is "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions", and one is all that plus "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing", which is to say, a person. What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat, but that doesn't actually imply that bats implement or contain a personal point of view. If they don't, then it might be that there is no "what it is like to be a bat", but at most "what it is like to experience being a bat as a person implemented by a system which is not a bat".
- why_at 4mo agoI think he makes it pretty clear he's only talking about the second one of your two definitions >What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat He says: >[what] it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?
- simiones 4mo ago> The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this? This is definitely a possibility given the very basic level of understanding we have of this. The reality is that we don't know, and we don't even have a well defined way to know (that is, we don't even have any idea what kind of proof we would need to bring that animals have an experience of the world in some sense that is the same as ours but different from a rock's).
- 4mo ago
- dwd 4mo agoFor a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies: - Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or - Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology. For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolution developed algorithm for processing the world is wired to our senses. Similarly a bat's perception of the world has evolved along with bat senses and is not the same as ours. Without any of the evolutionary pre-wiring, a human conscious dropped into a bat would be deaf, dumb and blind.
- fellowniusmonk 4mo agoThis seems like a clear false dichotomy.
- t-writescode 4mo agoBut when you look at brain organoids they quickly find themselves able to play video games as complex as Doom.
- KingMob 4mo agoThe essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness. > "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
- anon-3988 4mo agoThis is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not a bat. This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be you, the commenter. As I am writing this, I am imagining a consciousness on the other side of the monitor that is somewhat like me. But this is just my consciousness extending itself and imagining another consciousness within its own consciousness.
- visarga 4mo agoI think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in relation to old experience. That makes representation personal, being made of one's own past experience. This does not explain away pure feeling, but explains how we make discriminations of similarity and difference between our experiences, the contents of qualia, the qualitative aspects. We also know brains are locked inside a bone box only connected to the outside world by a bundle of unlabeled nerves, there is no direct access. So the brain can only compare patterns of signals it receives from outside. But since this representation-action-learning loop is recursive it cannot be inhabited or known from outside, 3p needs to pay the price of recursion to execute in order to get to 1p. The gap is that between description and execution, which cannot be crossed for free with cheap description. Execution costs, and that cost is part of what is like being a bat. We can't inhabit their cost pressures since we don't have their context and body. You can't remove the costs of being a bat from "what it is like being a bat" and still get your answer from the comfort of the philosophical armchair.
- robwwilliams 4mo agoYou nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.
- EGreg 4mo agoOh, I’d say they had some good clues.
- whakim 4mo agoIsn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient to explain consciousness - qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.
- DanSmooth 4mo agoRelevant SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bot-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bot-3
- themafia 4mo agoI feel like consciousness is an emergent phenomenon derived from several brain processes that constructively overlap. Many mammals have several necessary elements but lack the complete set of structures necessary to achieve what an average human would identify as "consciousness." Which is why we can probably find loads of examples /and/ counter-examples of "consciousness" throughout the animal kingdom. We already know that our left and right brain hemispheres are quite different and play significant roles in this process. It then seems that we are not, from first principles, even capable of observing all of the individual elements that make up our "minds." It's sort of like pornography. I can't define it. I just know it when I see it.
- kreyenborgi 4mo agoHow would you know? What evidence can you put forth that say a dog or dormouse does not have a conscious experience, but your next door neighbour (presumably human) has?
- themafia 4mo agoBehavioral observation.
- lwhi 4mo agoThe conclusion to me, is that we may be able to build systems that behave intelligently before we understand whether intelligence and consciousness are connected at all.
- MarceliusK 4mo agoSoo an outside description of a system, no matter how complete, does not obviously give us the inside of the experience...
- skc 4mo agoSo I've always thought what if each of our individual consciousnesses is like a radio frequency that is unique to each individual? This would explain why we regain consciousness when we wake up, because our physiology is locked to whatever that frequency happens to be. Under this model, 'you' don't actually reside inside your skull. Instead, your brain is just biological hardware translating a non-local broadcast, meaning our core identity exists independently of the body. That unique frequency "fingerprint" is close enough in pattern to every other human being that we're able to "understand" each other a process that might manifests in interesting but complex ways eg love and empathy Bats might be a whole frequency band up!
- simiones 4mo agoThis is pure pseudo-science at its finest. You're using sciencey words without putting any real meaning behind them. A frequency has to be a frequency of something (e.g. an electromagnetic wave). There would also have to be a mechanism that would explain why each body is tied to exactly one and only one "frequency" throughout its entire life, and why it never happens that different bodies share a consciousness; and there are thousand other things - but I'll stop here as I've already put more thought into this non-idea than it deserves.
- Linello 4mo agoIt's very likely related to this beautiful article by Katherine Hayles https://modesofcognition.antikythera.org/ https://modesofcognition.antikythera.org/
- kreyenborgi 4mo agoIs there a plain pdf? That page was extremely hard to read and Reader mode doesn't seem to handle it in Firefox
- phrotoma 4mo agoAbsolutely savage document reading experience.
- throstur 4mo agoOf all the papers I've read over the years, this was one that not only became immediately memorable, but I have brought up numerous times in conversation.
- Hotdogsteve 4mo agoOne of my favorite bits from this is actually a footnote: "It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 "2 Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience."