What is it like to be a bat?

“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.

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.

> 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?

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.

My mind drastically changed several times, and I somewhat remember how it worked previously.