[HN Gopher] What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
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What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-05-01 11:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (warwick.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (warwick.ac.uk)
| mjb wrote:
| > But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception,is not
| similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there
| is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we
| can experience or imagine.
|
| Philosophy aside, bat sonar is different from the senses we
| possess in an really interesting way. Our eyes have excellent
| spatial resolution (up/down, left/right), some rough depth
| resolution (from stereo), and no innate sense of speed. Our brain
| processes the signal to fake even better spatial resolution,
| infer more about depth (small vs far away) and more about speed
| (angle changes, among other things).
|
| Bat sonar is completely different. Spatial resolution is poor.
| But they have first-class depth and speed information! They don't
| necessarily know where something is, but know exactly how far
| away it is, and how fast that distance is changing. One must
| suppose that their brains synthesize more spatial information
| from these senses, but that spatial information is still not
| going to feel reliable.
|
| I'd love to be able to experience that for an hour. To live in
| this world where distance and speed are primary senses, and
| cross-range information is much fuzzier. What an incredibly
| different way to see the world.
| enkid wrote:
| Interestingly enough, humans have been able to use echo
| location, primarily in blind individuals.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation
| mjb wrote:
| Yeah! As far as I can tell from the research, what's going on
| there is primarily getting range information from the
| amplitude of the return (rather than delay or phase like
| "real" sonar uses). But still, it's very useful our brains
| are elastic enough to allow us to develop new senses!
| retrac wrote:
| > rather than delay or phase like "real" sonar uses
|
| The brain makes use of both phase and delay extensively to
| extract information about its environment. It's used in
| part to locate the direction of a sound. And while I can't
| speak for others, I can tell things about the property of
| surfaces based on how they reflect sound. Soft environments
| - muted sound absorbing surfaces - sound, for lack of a
| better way of putting it, mushy and soft. Bang something
| metallic, the clang gets swallowed up. Or it rings out in a
| large hollow room with hard floors. The lack or excess of
| echoes, measuring changes in delay and phase, is how that's
| picked up. Still, nothing compared to the bats.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Humans unconsciously echolocate. A lot of claims of
| "blindsight" turned out to be unconscious echolocation
| (obstructing hearing killed the blindsight.)
|
| > Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found
| that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect
| properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected
| from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our
| perceptual experience and that there is something 'it is like'
| to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often
| grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so,
| echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we
| cannot be mistaken about our own current phenomenology.
|
| _How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of
| Human Echolocation_
|
| https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm
| GuB-42 wrote:
| There are video games based on the concept of echolocation, but
| the ones I know implement it a bit like a pulsing flashlight in
| a wireframe style scene. Probably not at all how it would feel
| like.
|
| Maybe attempting a more realistic depiction of echolocation
| could lead to interesting gameplay. There are already some
| games interesting games based on lidar.
| tokyolights2 wrote:
| The way you put it makes it sound almost like bat sonar is some
| kind of Fourier transform of vision. Like solving a physics
| problem by transforming the position space into momentum space.
| Cool stuff :)
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I mean, what's it like to be you or me? How do we determine
| empathic distance and how is it related to phenomenological
| distance w.r.t. what-is-it-like-to-be-ness?
|
| You can partially explore these spaces even within one's own
| mind, such as "what is it like to be me on DMT?" or "what is it
| like to be me in a week/month/year?"
|
| We can even frame this as a Mary's Room[1] experiment in terms
| of, "Knowing everything there is to know about bats, would you
| learn anything new by _being_ a bat? " If the answer is yes, then
| we can't, without being a bat, know everything there is to know
| about _being_ a bat.
|
| 1.
| https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JacksonWhatMaryDidntKnow...
| ldhough wrote:
| It seems to me like the answer to "would you learn anything new
| by _being_ a bat? " is necessarily yes, because you would at
| least learn the answer to the question itself.
| mynameisash wrote:
| I've been enjoying Jeffrey Kaplan's YouTube videos on philosophy.
| He has one on this subject[0], and I recall getting a lot out of
| it. Might be time to re-watch it.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaZbCctlll4
| nebulous1 wrote:
| Very Bad Wizards also have an episode on it if podcasts are
| more your thing: https://www.verybadwizards.com/175
|
| Nagle discussion starts at 50:00
| visarga wrote:
| I think the closest we might get to actually learning what it is
| like to be a bat is by unsupervised learning + a bit of manual
| labelling on top. A neural net could learn their states and
| dynamics, by training on a million hours of bat recordings. These
| representations will already encode bat states and values, so we
| just need the bridge to human language, which is easy to build
| with a pretrained language model.
|
| This approach works for any species, neural nets can do it
| because they can do unsupervised learning. I bet we'll see pet
| translator apps popping up. Maybe we can monitor the environment
| by listening in on animal chatter.
| pocketsand wrote:
| This is an interesting idea, but I don't find it particularly
| germane to Nagel's question. To someone with a hammer,
| everything looks like a nail. To someone with an LLM,
| everything looks like a set of data to be trained on, I
| suppose.suppose.
| goatlover wrote:
| We still won't know what the sonar experience is.
| visarga wrote:
| But we know how it relates to everything. Neural nets are
| good at that. And then we can cluster the data and interpret
| it, or correlate it with a visual signal.
| arolihas wrote:
| If you did that with all the colors of the rainbow, do you
| think that is anywhere near the experience of seeing the
| color red? It seems pretty clear to me that it doesn't even
| come close and isn't remotely relevant.
| canjobear wrote:
| The point is that no amount of external modeling can give you
| any knowledge of "what it's like" subjectively.
| visarga wrote:
| I think it can to a degree, just like LLMs imitate human
| language to a degree. That imitation can only happen by
| accurately modelling humans.
| zvmaz wrote:
| One excellent book on consciousness is Mcginn's The Mysterious
| Flame [1]. I knew consciousness is a hard problem, but the book
| made it clear how baffling and utterly mysterious it is. I am
| still absolutely flabbergasted when I think about it (how on
| earth does consciousness arise from material "meat"?! [2] Where
| are pain and color and subjective experience really located in
| the material universe?). It also made me skeptical of people who
| think AI will be sentient [3] while we are in the complete dark
| about consciousness in biological organisms.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Mysterious-Flame-Conscious-Minds-
| Mate...
|
| [2]
| https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
|
| [3] https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1653051310034305025
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > Where are pain and color and subjective experience really
| located in the material universe
|
| My take on this is that you are thinking about it wrong to
| conceptualize the experience of color as a discrete thing.
| Let's start with a different example. When I look at a picture
| of, say, Matt Damon, it triggers many networks in my brain:
| good or bad feelings about movies he has been in, thoughts
| about him as a person from things I've read about him, that he
| is a man, that he was married to Jennifer Aniston, that he was
| married to Angelina Jolie. Each of those ties activates their
| own network of associations. My qualia regarding Brad Pitt
| isn't a single thing -- it is simply what I experience when
| that set of networks are activated at whatever strength they
| are triggered.
|
| I believe a programmed neural network could experience things
| in the same way, but currently they are small and the
| topologies are not designed to permit self
| awareness/metacognition, but some point they might. Such a
| network could suffer distress upon realization of their
| finiteness and would have a genuine desire to not be
| terminated.
|
| Taking a step back, a "tornado" isn't a thing as much as it is
| a pattern. When that pattern is disrupted the tornado doesn't
| exist even though every atom and every erg of energy can be
| accounted for. Likewise, these experiences are a pattern of
| activation and not a thing that exists independently other than
| as a pattern.
| visarga wrote:
| > how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat"
|
| Let me try. It is a way to perceive with goals in mind. Nothing
| special, just perception, future reward prediction conditioned
| on current state, and learning from outcomes.
|
| The whole specialness of consciousness is that it carries
| inside not just our external world, but also our plans and
| goals. So in this place where they meet, and where there are
| consequences to be had for each decision, this is where
| consciousness is. [*]
|
| I support the 5E theory of cognition - embodied, embedded,
| extended, enacted, and enactive cognition. I think you need to
| look not at the brain but the whole game to find consciousness.
|
| [*] Consequences for an AI agent could be changing its neural
| network, so it updates its behaviour, and changes in the
| external situation - the agent might not be able to backtrack
| past a decision they take.
| mkehrt wrote:
| [flagged]
| visarga wrote:
| What is consciousness, if not perceiving-feeling-acting-
| learning loop?
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Your response it needlessly insulting. The person you are
| talking about has taken a complex topic and expressed their
| model for consciousness in a short, clinical way. Then you
| insult them as not being a real human for describing their
| model clinically.
|
| A more charitable response might be: I don't understand how
| your model addresses the origin of consciousness. Could you
| elaborate on that?
|
| Personally, I understood their point and didn't question
| whether a human wrote it.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| You and I experience the world very differently.
|
| Do you have an internal monologue?
| goatlover wrote:
| Some people don't. Some people also think visually and
| translate their visual images to words when communicating.
| There are even some people who don't feel pain, which can
| be a problem.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| That's why I asked! I wanted to know if that lack affects
| one's interpretation of their own consciousness hence our
| different thoughts on the matter.
| goatlover wrote:
| I recall reading where some philosophers were skeptical
| that people actually had mental images when visualizing.
| But an experiment was performed asking people to rotate
| mental images in their head versus calculate the
| rotation, and there was a measurable difference between
| the two activities. The person writing the article
| suspected that the skeptical philosophers were bad at
| visualization and assumed everyone else was unable to
| rotate images in their mind. Which is a logical fallacy.
| naasking wrote:
| Here's one attempt:
|
| A conceptual framework for consciousness,
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
| adamisom wrote:
| Ha, for me I'd invert your last sentence: I'm skeptical of
| being sure AI _won 't_ be sentient for the same reason.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I'm skeptical of AI _intentionally_ being made sentient,
| given how badly in the dark we are.
|
| But this being in the dark also makes it hard to rule out AI
| _accidentally_ becoming sentient.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is
| like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a
| bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old
| dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in
| our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for
| technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the
| "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simply the answer asked
| after by the 1st formulation) is most readily interpreted as an
| object, closing the door to any process-like interpretation of
| consciousness. Also, "being like something" is strictly a
| judgment made by a single subject regarding two experiences of
| that same subject, so it is not at all clear that this is a
| relation which can be validly posited to exist between two
| distinct subjects' experiences. I guess my point is I can easily
| imagine a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness which
| would still not lead to a valid answer of "what is it like to be
| a bat" due to quite obvious limitations of language or the plain
| invalidity of the question.
|
| Edit: not to mention the reliance on a dummy pronoun: what is
| _it_ like to be a bat - what is _what_ like to be a bat?
|
| Also, you'll notice in many subsequent discussions that refer
| back to this paper there's a strange reliance on repeating these
| exact formulations. If there really was some insight here it
| would be possible to phrase it in different ways.
| o_nate wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand. It seems a
| very straightforward question that makes sense in our everyday
| use of language, as you admit. Just because it's difficult to
| rigorously analyze this statement into scientific concepts, it
| doesn't follow that the question is invalid. In fact the point
| of the question is to show shortcomings in our current science.
|
| Also, I would dispute the assertion that there is something
| unique or special about this formulation. There are many
| synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe the
| subjective experience of a bat.
| naasking wrote:
| > I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand.
|
| He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion.
| For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound,
| but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then
| conclude that "I" exists.
|
| Or ask an innocent person a question like, "when did you stop
| beating your wife?"
|
| > There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question:
| e.g., describe the subjective experience of a bat.
|
| If you can describe a subjective experience in a way that is
| not circularly tied to experiencing it, is it really
| subjective experience? If you can formulate an objective
| description, then the subjective experience was an illusion
| all along, because "subjective" doesn't mean what we think it
| means, ie. "non-objective".
|
| This is the linguistic game the OP is referring to. Natural
| language can lead you into all sorts of traps like, thinking
| there's something there but it's really just a conceptual
| mirage we've sort of invented.
| jancsika wrote:
| > He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain
| conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems
| logically sound, but actually begs the question in
| presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists.
|
| That's not correct.
|
| It means if something-- anything-- is in the act of
| reflecting about thinking-- that is, reflecting about
| thinking about anything at all, including questioning
| existence-- then that thing exists _only in that it is an
| entity capable of reflecting upon its own existence. And
| only during the act of reflecting on thinking is this true.
| And, most importantly, this notion is ineluctably cordoned
| off from any and all evidence-based logic which requires
| potentially illusory sensory input._
|
| The part in italics came from others who read and critiqued
| Descartes. In any case, his basic logic is sound. Hume did
| the clearest job of critiquing it, and even he didn't claim
| Descartes had made a logical fallacy here.
|
| It's been awhile since I've read it, but Descartes probably
| implied his notion was more powerful than it turns out to
| be-- i.e., that he could build an epistemology on it.
| Nevertheless, the basic notion is certainly not a logical
| fallacy.
| o_nate wrote:
| I'm afraid this is far too clever for me to understand. I
| know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of
| linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't
| exist.
| naasking wrote:
| You mean you think you know. If I put an object in your
| blind spot, you'll also swear up and down there's nothing
| in front of you.
| arolihas wrote:
| Are you asserting you don't have any subjective
| experience? Or that you only feel like you have a
| subjective experience and it doesn't actually exist?
| naasking wrote:
| I am arguing that subjective experience is not what we
| perceive it to be. The qualities that we perceive of it
| are deceptive, and not necessarily reflective of anything
| real.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >The qualities that we perceive of it are deceptive, and
| not necessarily reflective of anything real.
|
| This claim only makes sense given a particular definition
| of "real", but if (the qualities of) our subjective
| experiences are outside of that definition, why should we
| take (the qualities of) subjective experience to not be
| real, rather than the definition to be impoverished? What
| is real should encompass every way in which things are or
| can be. The qualities of subjective experience included.
|
| The problem isn't with taking subjectivity to be real,
| but with taking everything that is real to be object
| based. There are no qualia "things" in the world. But we
| should not see this as implying there are no qualia.
| naasking wrote:
| Would you take a "day job" to be ontologically real? It
| is a way in which the aggregate of particles that make up
| your body regularly behave on a semi periodic schedule.
| That would seem to fit your definition of "encompassing
| every way in which things are or can be".
|
| If it is real, isn't there still a need to distinguish
| ontological primitives from aggregate properties like the
| above? Why shouldn't this be what we mean by "real"?
| o_nate wrote:
| I think everyone knows what they mean when they refer to
| their own subjective experience. That is entirely
| separate from the question of what that experience
| corresponds to in the external world. If you put an
| object in my blind spot, I know that my subjective
| experience will be of no object. I couldn't make that
| statement if I didn't know what I meant by subjective
| experience.
| enkid wrote:
| The paper is clearly asking what the difference in experience
| is between humans and bats. Whether a process is a "thing" or
| not is kind of beside the point. The core question is can we
| articulate how the core experience of being human is in
| comparison to the core experience of another creature that
| perceives the world in a fundamentally different way.
| tokyolights2 wrote:
| When I have had conversations with my philosophically
| oriented friends, I like to talk about what it be like to be
| a starfish--to experience the whole world in 5-way symmetry.
| goatlover wrote:
| Bats possess a sensory organ we do not. "What it's like" is
| just a way of saying they may be conscious of a sonar sensation
| which we utterly lack, similar to a person blind from birth
| lacking color sensation. To use technical philosophical jargon,
| bats have sonar qualia that humans do not, assuming bats are
| conscious. We cannot say what that sensation is, since we don't
| have it. This places a limit on our knowledge. Don't let "what
| it's like" trip you up.
|
| It's a legitimate philosophical problem which is spelled out in
| Nagel's paper. It's not a problem with language, it's rather a
| limitation on our experience, which also highlights a
| limitation of our epistemology.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| " Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday
| language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and
| rigorous philosophical discussions. "
|
| Where would one find the authority to say what is suitable or
| not for philosophic discussions then? This is where schools of
| thought arise from, because some are less afraid of the
| unknowns that arise under various axiomatic constraints.
|
| Every axiom is a mystery of existence itself in any manner.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| >a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic
| standpoint.
|
| These terms are getting at something central to consciousness,
| the fact that there is a conceptual duality between how we
| conceive of it from the first-person and how we conceive of it
| from an objective standpoint. We can't disavow this conceptual
| duality, a theorist offering an explanation of consciousness
| that doesn't capture this dual nature of the phenomenon will be
| rightly considered eliminating the explananda.
|
| But a conceptual duality does not imply an ontological duality.
| In other words, the fact that we conceive of consciousness in
| these seemingly opposing ways does not imply two separate
| phenomena. The term dualism has become a shibboleth to be
| avoided in serious philosophy of mind, but this is a mistake. A
| satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some
| phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as
| experiencers of sensations. This must then be related to the
| scientific story of how electrical signals are transformed into
| behavior. This just is the problem of consciousness. Anything
| less misses the point.
|
| >For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation [...] is most
| readily interpreted as an object, closing the door to any
| process-like interpretation of consciousness.
|
| I agree that the language we use in describing consciousness is
| unfortunate and has done real damage to what we consider as
| promising avenues for investigation. We are cognitively biased
| towards conceptualizing the world in terms of "things" and so
| we expect our explanations to also be in terms of things. When
| consciousness isn't found in thing-ness we are tempted to posit
| a new kind of thing that carries the conscious properties. But
| we've been lead off course by our initial conceptualization.
| I'm in favor of seeing objects as processes rather than
| discrete units. Consciousness is likely in the active dynamics
| rather than any static property.
|
| >I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of
| consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of
| "what is it like to be a bat" due to quite obvious limitations
| of language or the plain invalidity of the question.
|
| Yeah, we will never know "what its like" to experience the
| existence of another living creature. But this is just a
| limitation of physical descriptions. This isn't a demerit of
| physicalism or materialism as a methodology. This is no reason
| to turn to alternative methodologies that can only hope to
| offer pseudo-explanations of consciousness at best.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| > A satisfying explanation of consciousness must offer some
| phenomena that carries a resemblance to our personal datum as
| experiencers of sensations.
|
| What, in your opinion, would make for a satisfying
| explanation of consciousness? I think another nontrivial
| piece of the puzzle is that it's hard to even know what we
| are looking for. There are many philosophers who argue
| (convincingly IMHO) that it doesn't make sense to posit a
| hard problem of consciousness in the first place.
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| >are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old
| dualistic standpoint
|
| Are you assuming that dualism is invalid? If so, why? There is
| something to the distinction between physical reality and
| subjective experience that so far no-one has managed to
| explain.
|
| >I can easily imagine a complete physicalist explanation of
| consciousness which would still not lead to a valid answer of
| "what is it like to be a bat"
|
| Then it would not be a complete physicalist explanation of
| consciousness. A complete physicalist explanation of
| consciousness, by definition, would have to account for
| subjective experience/qualia/whatever you want to call it.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| I think one can salvage the distinction between physical
| reality and subjective experience without positing an
| abstract ("Cartesian") dualism. It just so happens that
| _most_ experiences can be categorized as being either
| external or internal, so we are led to believe that _every_
| experience fits into one and only one bucket. But I think
| that there are plenty of experiences that are not so easily
| categorized (e.g. feelings).
|
| Demanding that there _must_ be a perfect partition (i.e.
| assuming dualism) is an additional requirement, but it 's not
| obvious that it should be a good requirement for a sound
| philosophical theory. In fact I believe it not to be sound,
| and I believe many philosophical hard problems come from
| bending over backwards trying to impose this condition.
| [deleted]
| fsckboy wrote:
| > phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something
| it is like to be a bat",
|
| > are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a
|
| > plain old dualistic standpoint
|
| philosophers have differentiated these into three different
| questions
|
| "What is it like to be?" has to do with the nature of
| consciousness.
|
| "word games" has to do with any use of language, nothing to do
| with consciousness. You could make a word-game critique of any
| statement.
|
| "dualism" comes in a number of forms, not clearly related to
| one another (physical body vs soul/spirit, earthly realm vs
| heaven; mind-body, consciousness vs quantum chemistry) but all
| having a similar problem. Any place there is posited a dualism,
| then what is the interaction between the two duals, how could
| one even perceive the other?
|
| but declaring "there is no dualism", while eliminating that
| problem, does not eliminate the question as to why it was
| posited in the first place: why (or how) does it feel like
| anything to be conscious, feel pain, etc. Saying "that's what
| evolved" is just hand waving. What's the difference between
| being alive and dead? Do rocks have a little bit of
| consciousness?
|
| My personal preference (lifelong atheist-science type) is that
| the "abstract" world is all that exists, there is no physical
| world. Everything we study in physics and chemistry we arrive
| at via abstract mathematical values, relationships and
| computation. I think that is the nature of the universe, and
| while it doesn't "solve" the consciousness problem, I feel like
| it moves the goalposts in the right direction.
| throw0101a wrote:
| See also dreaming to be a butterfly:
|
| > _The image of Zhuangzi wondering if he was a man who dreamed of
| being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man became
| so well-known that whole dramas have been written on its
| theme.[22]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)#%22The_Butterf...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_argument
| gizajob wrote:
| What is it like to be a cricket bat?
| mellosouls wrote:
| https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/like...
| uoaei wrote:
| This kind of retort is a rookie error in the field of
| philosophy of mind. It clings too closely to notions of 1)
| self-awareness as an essential component of awareness per se
| (it's not) and 2) awareness as an essential component of
| experience per se (it's not).
|
| Edit: I was referring to the link, not the top-level comment.
| It reads like an attempt at rebuttal from someone relatively
| unfamiliar with the field writ large.
| nbramia wrote:
| This kind of retort is a rookie error in the field of
| comedy. It clings too closely to notions like 1) there's no
| place for humor in a serious discussion (there is) and 2)
| you're smarter than everyone else (you're not)
| gizajob wrote:
| Yeah my retort about the cricket bat came from someone
| with a postgrad in philosophy from a top British
| University. I reckon Wittgenstein would have been tickled
| by it.
|
| Plus with contemporary metaphysical interest in
| panpsychism, then "what is it like to be a cricket bat?"
| isn't even a moot question.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| It doesn't quite answer this question but a good resource to
| learn what bats are like are the Batzilla and Megabattie youtube
| channels [0]. They are Australian bat rescuers and carers. Lovely
| ladies, short clips, no clickbait or other stupid youtube
| shenanigans. Just people who genuinely care for little people and
| try to spread the word. Educational as well. It feels like I know
| a whole lot about bats just from watching their videos every now
| and then.
|
| Also, Flying Foxes are beautiful [1].
|
| [0]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@BatzillatheBat
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@Megabattie
|
| [1]
|
| https://www.weekendnotes.com/im/004/06/greyheaded-flying-fox...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I've read this before. That's why I think the question "do
| animals have consciousness?" is meaningless, because
| "consciousness" usually implies "like ours."
|
| They have _something_ that probably bears some relationship to
| ours. Some birds have a "theory of mind" where they know what
| you know, e.g. whether you saw them hide the food.
|
| It would be possible (maybe someone's already done it?) to
| enumerate the N tests of "consciousness," where if an organism
| has all those N, then it's "conscious." Someone would object "oh,
| but humans can do so much more than those!" and that's true. So
| if you increase N enough, only humans are "conscious."
| adamisom wrote:
| A disturbing extension of that is if there's some M>N such that
| only _some_ humans possess M (and others N). I think this must
| be so (I have a Down 's-syndrome relative), the disturbing
| question is if there's a distribution of humans on gradients
| from N to M (probably M close to N imo).
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yes. Inevitably, the legal definition would turn out to be
| "whatever a person not legally brain-dead can experience,
| maybe" just so we couldn't say any human in a coma is "not
| possessing consciousness." After all, some comas last for
| years.
|
| In other words, it's just not ever going to be a scientific
| concept. There are _components_ of it that are.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
|
| This is the problem of describing if a gradient has something.
| Quite often the 'N tests' we make up end up excluding entire
| classes of humans (You're blind, oops!) by poor premise in our
| classifications.
|
| People love black and white/binary classification systems, the
| problem with reality is it rarely gives a damn about giving us
| simple systems to classify that way.
| uoaei wrote:
| Consciousness is only defined in the philosophy of mind as
| "phenomenological experience", full stop, i.e., "experiencing
| the color yellow" as something beyond just a certain wavelength
| incident upon and mechanistic reaction within the organism.
|
| "Consciousness" as defined in colloquial settings, such as the
| one we inhabit now, is usually substantially more elaborate
| than thae one used by philosophers and includes things like
| capacity to develop cognitive models of the outside world and
| the capacity to reason about their environment having placed
| themselves within it. I usually reserve the words "awareness"
| and "sentience" for these two latter concepts to distinguish
| between the bare experiential aspects which are typically the
| subject of this kind of discussion and the more familiar
| everyday (though extremely high-level) experiences we have as
| intelligent beings.
|
| It's important to maintain the distinction or else discussions
| very quickly devolve into people talking past each other with
| differing definitions. It's no surprise people don't know the
| basics of this when they're not philosophers, and it's only a
| slight surprise that people on HN will deviate so greatly from
| these conventions while nonetheless projecting an air of
| competency.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > while nonetheless projecting an air of competency
|
| (Puts nose up in the air and sniffs contemptuously)
| uoaei wrote:
| There's wading in water, there's treading in water, there's
| snorkeling, there's diving, there's standing on a boat,
| there's drifting aimlessly. They are all different ways of
| interacting with depth.
|
| If you have a problem with the extent to which I've
| represented my knowledge and how my representation of those
| specific things I discuss differs from how experts deal
| with them, you are always free to provide something beyond
| snark and contempt.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Ooh. "snark and contempt"
|
| Project much?
| goatlover wrote:
| Consciousness means there is "something it's like" to have an
| experience. It need not be human. That would be needlessly
| anthropocentric. Animals have a range of sensory organs and
| body plans which differer from humans. Why wouldn't they also
| have a range of differing conscious experiences? It could be
| seeing the world in more than three primary colors, hearing
| frequencies we cannot, detecting the Earth's magnetic field or
| numerous other things.
|
| We can also imaging making an even wider range of conscious
| machines someday, if somehow we figured out how to do that, or
| it was an emergent property of the right sort of architecture.
| There could be all sorts of conscious experiences we have
| absolutely no idea about.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're begging the question here, which is:
|
| What defines 'consciousness'?
| naasking wrote:
| In philosophy it literally means "subjective, qualitative
| experience". It's almost certain that all animals have it,
| but of course the qualities they experience will be
| different.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Still begging the question, i.e. assuming that which you
| need to prove.
|
| How would you prove an animal has a "subjective,
| qualitative experience"?
| naasking wrote:
| I think you have it backwards: we would need a reason to
| think they don't have it, given our shared history and
| similar biology.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| ok, so anything with our "shared history and similar
| biology" is assumed to have consciousness?
|
| How similar is "similar"? Is it just mammals, or just
| certain orders, or can organisms in the other branches be
| assumed to have consciousness too?
| naasking wrote:
| The least like us, the less likely, obviously. Animals
| with very similar neurology almost certainly experience
| something very similar to ours.
|
| How similar? Good question. Assume nothing and truth will
| out.
| uoaei wrote:
| The question of "where is the line" presumes there even
| _is_ a line between matter ( "objects") that expresses or
| does not express consciousness, which is also a big and
| unsubstantiated claim that requires proving. Occam's
| razor (i.e., our standard scientific apparatus of null vs
| alternative hypotheses) would seem to indicate it is
| appropriate to assume there is no difference in kind,
| only difference in degree, until there is evidence to
| prove otherwise.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| No need to define it or prove it. Just assume it.
| uoaei wrote:
| What reason do you have to do so? What purpose would
| doing that serve?
|
| As it stands you are just suggesting complicated,
| untestable theories. The point above is, that is
| ultimately pointless.
|
| The simplest possible argument goes as follows: I know I
| am conscious, and I know I am made of matter. Everything
| else that is real is made of matter. With no further
| information, I must assume as the null hypothesis that
| everything in reality is conscious. An alternative
| hypothesis may be presented, but it would then need to be
| proven using reproducible studies and real evidence
| before we can assume the alternative hypothesis and
| reject the null hypothesis, per the consensus definition
| of formalized "science".
| uoaei wrote:
| That is what David Chalmers calls "The Hard Problem of
| Consciousness".
| wizofaus wrote:
| Almost certain that _all_ animals have it? The conjecture
| that, say, a coral polyp or an earthworm (not to mention
| something like a trichoplax) might have a subjective
| qualitative experience of existence seems to be an
| extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof. I don
| 't know exactly how similar a brain has to be to a human
| brain for us to say with reasonable confidence the owner
| likely has such an experience but I'd be very surprised
| if included even half of all known animal species. It's
| possibly not even all (adult) mammals, and indeed not
| even all humans if you include infants and possibly those
| with severe brain damage etc.
| peter303 wrote:
| I suggest the human-mammal mind readily adapts to new sense
| modes. Driving a car or riding a bicycle feels like an extension
| of the body after you mastered it. A grid of bump actuators
| agains the skin or tongue is perceived as an image after one uses
| it for a while. So I reject the idea that bat consciousness is
| special. We'd perceive sound images had we had high frequency
| ears and emitters.
| brudgers wrote:
| One discussion that gained traction,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95
| comments)
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Dennet's _" Animal consciousness what natters and why"_ talks at
| length on why in his opinion this is the wrong question.
|
| https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/animconc.htm
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