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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: 0.2s | source
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edbaskerville ◴[03 Sep 25 22:25 UTC] No.45121036[source]▶
Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.

I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

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HarHarVeryFunny ◴[03 Sep 25 23:10 UTC] No.45121365[source]▶
> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision

Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.

In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.

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IAmBroom ◴[04 Sep 25 13:55 UTC] No.45127327[source]▶
> In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one,

What do you mean by that distinction?

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1. HarHarVeryFunny ◴[04 Sep 25 20:56 UTC] No.45132091[source]▶
If you contrast vision and hearing, vision is about things with spatial extent (the 2-D/3-D scene you are looking at), and I think the subjective experience of visual attributes like color comes directly from that - color being fundamentally a spatial attribute that differentiates surfaces (as you scan your eyes around), with this providing a common base quale of experiencing any color - the experience of a sensed attribute that changes, or not, as we scan a scene.

In contrast, hearing is a temporal sense primarily about temporal sequences of changing patterns of sensed frequencies, and we experience this as sensed attributes that change, or not, over time (and which may surprise us, or not, by matching previously experienced temporal sequences).

I think echolocation is more like vision in this regard, perhaps more like the flashlight example, but an input that varies spatially rather than temporally.