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What is it like to be a bat?

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180 points adityaathalye | 2 comments | 03 Sep 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.697s | source
1. o_nate ◴[03 Sep 25 19:56 UTC] No.45119799[source]▶
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words:

"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)

replies(1): >>45134417 #
2. dredmorbius ◴[05 Sep 25 02:23 UTC] No.45134417[source]▶
The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. “If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen would draw them to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.

- Xenophanes, ~500 BCE

<https://www.azquotes.com/author/38174-Xenophanes>