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What is it like to be a bat?

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180 points adityaathalye | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mistidoi ◴[] No.45119208[source]
Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...

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HarHarVeryFunny ◴[] No.45121301[source]
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask.

The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".

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glenstein ◴[] No.45122543[source]
I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they are very powerful intuitive reasons for believing they are to the point that I that I'm not particularly concerned about this being a weak link in any philosophical musing on consciousness.
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NoMoreNicksLeft ◴[] No.45123783[source]
>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they

We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.

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1. phreeza ◴[] No.45123890{3}[source]
There are attempts at a quantifitative definition of consciousness, for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...