Apr 22, 2023 06:39 PM
https://www.wired.com/story/aliens-scien...agination/
INTRO: Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” unfortunately does not endeavor to answer its titular question. (As a friend put it, it should actually be called “We Will Never Know What It’s Like to Be a Bat, Alas.”)
But Nagel is not even interested in questions of batness. His project is to interrogate “the mind–body problem,” the struggle in philosophy or psychology to reduce the mind and consciousness to objective, physical terms. But around the edges of Nagel’s project, like tasty crumbs, we can grab at some useful ideas for imagining minds even stranger than bats: the minds of intelligent aliens.
First, Nagel gives us a helpful entry into the question of consciousness. He writes, “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness, then, is the ability to experience existence. It does not require intelligence, thought, or self-reflection, just the awareness of being. Nagel awards consciousness to far more animals than we might think of as humanlike or intelligent—not only bats but also mice, pigeons, and whales.
Nagel chooses bats because, as mammals, he believes they are safely attributed consciousness; but, in an inversion of the swimmer who finds himself beheld by a familiar consciousness in a whale’s eye, Nagel writes, “even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.”
A bat’s presence is plenty alien, the frenetic flitting and chirps; what we know of their senses confirms it. “Bat sonar,” Nagel writes, “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” (emphasis mine). It’s not just that bats perceive the world through a different sense; we cannot assume that their experience of a sonar world can be mapped at all onto our visual world. And that’s before even getting to the ways that living by sonar rather than sight would shape a consciousness beyond simple perception.
Just as bats make their way in darkness, so too... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” unfortunately does not endeavor to answer its titular question. (As a friend put it, it should actually be called “We Will Never Know What It’s Like to Be a Bat, Alas.”)
But Nagel is not even interested in questions of batness. His project is to interrogate “the mind–body problem,” the struggle in philosophy or psychology to reduce the mind and consciousness to objective, physical terms. But around the edges of Nagel’s project, like tasty crumbs, we can grab at some useful ideas for imagining minds even stranger than bats: the minds of intelligent aliens.
First, Nagel gives us a helpful entry into the question of consciousness. He writes, “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness, then, is the ability to experience existence. It does not require intelligence, thought, or self-reflection, just the awareness of being. Nagel awards consciousness to far more animals than we might think of as humanlike or intelligent—not only bats but also mice, pigeons, and whales.
Nagel chooses bats because, as mammals, he believes they are safely attributed consciousness; but, in an inversion of the swimmer who finds himself beheld by a familiar consciousness in a whale’s eye, Nagel writes, “even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.”
A bat’s presence is plenty alien, the frenetic flitting and chirps; what we know of their senses confirms it. “Bat sonar,” Nagel writes, “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” (emphasis mine). It’s not just that bats perceive the world through a different sense; we cannot assume that their experience of a sonar world can be mapped at all onto our visual world. And that’s before even getting to the ways that living by sonar rather than sight would shape a consciousness beyond simple perception.
Just as bats make their way in darkness, so too... (MORE - details)