What is it like to be a bat?

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...

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".

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.

>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.

Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't.

You can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).

There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.

I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.

Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon.

Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or measure.

That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for effects downstream of the real thing that isn't yet defined, the very kind of working definition I was talking about to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s WIMPs, axions, modifications of gravity, or something else entirely. If we do figure that out its something like those, that would be the definition, and you would be able to tell the difference between that and the thing you are presently calling a definition.

And, thankfully, a future physicist would not dismiss that out of hand because they would appreciate it's utility as a working definition while research was ongoing.