What is it like to be a bat?

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.”

Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.

> 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)

The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.

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.

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.

That’s called meta cognition (what humans do) not subjective experience - which is the feeling of what happens and sets animal or agentic creatures apart from rocks (not sure about plants)