What is it like to be a bat?

What is it like to be another person?

I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.

It's more or less OK, thank you for asking. Recently I felt:

Disappointed when I went somewhere and there wasn't any tea,

Enthralled by a story about someone guarding a mystical treasure alone in a remote museum on a dark and stormy night,

Sympathetic toward a hardworking guy nobody likes, but also aggravated by his bossiness to the point of swearing at him,

Confused due to waking up at 7 pm and not being sure how it happened.

You probably don't entirely understand any of those. What is it to entirely understand something? But you probably get the idea in each case.

I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.

True. I suppose every one of us has asked:

What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?

This has puzzled me since childhood.

What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?

I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning, and no one can say what the phrase means.

Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.

I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position.

And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.

What "defensiveness"? And you're accusing me of bad faith? Stick to talking about ideas, not people. I won't engage with you further.

I think about this sometimes. From the POV of being in the human body I feel we must all be "me". If I wasn't here having this specific subjective experience as a human user on hackernews, then I would be someone or something else having another or "their" experience.

If that's not the case then I'll just have no subjective experience, same as before I was born/instantiated.

> I suppose every one of us has asked

Not at all. I was shocked when I noticed that how few people have asked themselves this question. In fact, it is impossible to even explain this question to the majority of people. Most people confuse the question with "what makes us intelligent", missing the whole "first person perspective" aspect of it.

I guess evolution tries to stop us from asking question that might lead to nihilism.

It just means the experience of sensation. You're conscious of a purple object, the smell of brewed coffee, the feeling of a sharp pain, you have a resurfaced memory of a deceased relative, you visualize the beach, you dream of being unprepared for a test, You daydream while driving down a long road, you feel affection seeing a friend, you hear your internal dialog about the boss.

There's nothing incoherent here, they're just talking about subjective states of experience.

As I said, the phrase gets described in terms of other incoherent phrases ... it's entirely circular.

I explained how it's not. Focusing on linguistics of the words obscures the actual issue, which is how we experience the world through our sensory modalities.

There was no explanation of how it's not circular. "what it's like", "subjective experience", "qualia" ... these are all undefined terms which are only "explained" by reference to each other and by frantic ostension. Someone mentions breathing in the morning air and when I note that that's an activity, I'm accused of bad faith interpretation ... which is sheer projection. People will insist that everyone knows "what it's like" ... and around we go again. When someone engages in that activity, they may have an emotional response (not everyone will, not every time, and the response is not always the same). But what is an emotional response? It's not some magical mental ether, it's a physical molecular process mediated by hormones and neurotransmitters that shift activity levels in different parts of the brain. People like Tom Nagel and David Chalmers claim that they can conceive of zombies that are physically identical to humans but aren't conscious, they have no qualia or mental states, "there's nothing that it's like to be them"--yet being physically identical, the exact same physical responses to breathing the morning air occur in them, the same emotions, even though they are "just" mechanisms. Well, we are mechanisms too, and whatever "it's like to be" us, it's exactly the same with zombies, and facile responses about "breathing the morning air" don't help at all and fail to grasp what the issues of the debate are. Most people have little knowledge of the debate and little experience with philosophical precision and clarity. Thus we get nonsense claims like that focusing on the "linguistics" of the words obscures the issue. They mean semantics, i.e., meaning ... dismissing what the words we are using mean is a mug's game.