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What is it like to be a bat?

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180 points adityaathalye | 6 comments | 03 Sep 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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adityaathalye ◴[03 Sep 25 18:33 UTC] No.45119024[source]▶
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human.

The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.

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jm__87 ◴[03 Sep 25 19:25 UTC] No.45119544[source]▶
None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
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the_af ◴[03 Sep 25 20:39 UTC] No.45120163[source]▶
> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person

I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?

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1. jm__87 ◴[03 Sep 25 21:11 UTC] No.45120448[source]▶
Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.
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2. binary132 ◴[03 Sep 25 22:02 UTC] No.45120860[source]▶
In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.
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3. GoblinSlayer ◴[04 Sep 25 08:20 UTC] No.45124931[source]▶
My mind drastically changed several times, and I somewhat remember how it worked previously.
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4. the_af ◴[04 Sep 25 13:14 UTC] No.45126909[source]▶
Do you, or do you think you remember? Your memories are always distortions, not accurate snapshots of reality.

Have you never thought you remembered something with clarity, only to be told it's impossible because it never happened? Or another example, I often vividly remember something from a book (it was a photograph on this side of the page, lower right corner) and then when I look it up, it was in a different location and it wasn't the photo I remembered. But my mental imagery felt so precise!

I'm with grandparent, I think I would perceive my younger self as simultaneously familiar and alien.

5. backscratches ◴[06 Sep 25 06:06 UTC] No.45147003[source]▶
Safe to say most people are so uncurious about/distracted from their interior states/self reflection that very few if any people know what it is like to be them right now. Mostly we know a limited palette of reactions to stimuli, and every day the stimuli get narrower. LOUD FLUORESCENT SUGARY SEX.
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6. binary132 ◴[06 Sep 25 17:57 UTC] No.45151441{3}[source]▶
You forgot SCARY, but yeah I got thinking about this too. It’s also true that there is a lot of internal state people aren’t able to be aware of.