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What is it like to be a bat?

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180 points adityaathalye | 1 comments | 03 Sep 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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adityaathalye ◴[03 Sep 25 19:28 UTC] No.45119569[source]▶
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html

Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.

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1. phoenixhaber ◴[04 Sep 25 06:03 UTC] No.45124057[source]▶
What I got out of this is that propeller heads believe in the flame that turns the fan blade on the pedestal (toy) while gear heads like music boxes (toy). So people that believe in eggs are into food, propeller heads like color and heat while gear heads like sound. What then but the universe is made by our dispositions? Why not would the world be made as an experiment in optics or the vibrations of a universal wave? Isn't this just cherry picking? What are the relations of someone who believes in music (an audience!) to someone that believes in invention (immortality!) to someone that believes in relationships (other people!). Perhaps the purpose of life is to leave a legacy or to become famous or to see what there is to see in the world.

There is no answer which is why we are here is the only thought I can come up with. Life is a question that asks itself to be answered and in the living answers itself so completely that to ask what is the purpose would be to say "what is the purpose of a hammer if there were nothing else?" The answer and the question become themselves and are inseparable from not themselves excepting insofar as no life cannot question and so cannot answer.

Anyway belly button picking. It amuses me that this paper is similar in many respects to the title of the 2017 paper attention is all you need. What if attention are all you needed to become a bat? Look everyone I'm a bat! POOF you become a bat. That would be silly.