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What is it like to be a bat?

(en.wikipedia.org)
180 points adityaathalye | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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bettating ◴[] No.45119554[source]
What is it like to be another person?
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esafak ◴[] No.45119704[source]
I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
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jibal ◴[] No.45119865[source]
I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.
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goatlover ◴[] No.45124015[source]
It just means the experience of sensation. You're conscious of a purple object, the smell of brewed coffee, the feeling of a sharp pain, you have a resurfaced memory of a deceased relative, you visualize the beach, you dream of being unprepared for a test, You daydream while driving down a long road, you feel affection seeing a friend, you hear your internal dialog about the boss.

There's nothing incoherent here, they're just talking about subjective states of experience.

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1. jibal ◴[] No.45128342[source]
As I said, the phrase gets described in terms of other incoherent phrases ... it's entirely circular.
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2. goatlover ◴[] No.45128769[source]
I explained how it's not. Focusing on linguistics of the words obscures the actual issue, which is how we experience the world through our sensory modalities.
3. jibal ◴[] No.45134643[source]
There was no explanation of how it's not circular. "what it's like", "subjective experience", "qualia" ... these are all undefined terms which are only "explained" by reference to each other and by frantic ostension. Someone mentions breathing in the morning air and when I note that that's an activity, I'm accused of bad faith interpretation ... which is sheer projection. People will insist that everyone knows "what it's like" ... and around we go again. When someone engages in that activity, they may have an emotional response (not everyone will, not every time, and the response is not always the same). But what is an emotional response? It's not some magical mental ether, it's a physical molecular process mediated by hormones and neurotransmitters that shift activity levels in different parts of the brain. People like Tom Nagel and David Chalmers claim that they can conceive of zombies that are physically identical to humans but aren't conscious, they have no qualia or mental states, "there's nothing that it's like to be them"--yet being physically identical, the exact same physical responses to breathing the morning air occur in them, the same emotions, even though they are "just" mechanisms. Well, we are mechanisms too, and whatever "it's like to be" us, it's exactly the same with zombies, and facile responses about "breathing the morning air" don't help at all and fail to grasp what the issues of the debate are. Most people have little knowledge of the debate and little experience with philosophical precision and clarity. Thus we get nonsense claims like that focusing on the "linguistics" of the words obscures the issue. They mean semantics, i.e., meaning ... dismissing what the words we are using mean is a mug's game.