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

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".

What is it like to be a bat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 - Sept 2025 (294 comments)

What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 - May 2023 (117 comments)

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments)

Bonus:

A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...

https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-1/fruitbat/

"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."

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.

9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592

2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587

https://modesofcognition.antikythera.org/

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.

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?

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.