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).
“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.
>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed".
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states
Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"
edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)
> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have
experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious
experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something
which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the
subject himself'.
>Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do?
If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.
That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.
(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.
In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.
How would you describe the distinction?
> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"
There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical trick caused by collapsing a word that usually relates two distinct things ("A is like B") onto a singular "something".
A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words:
"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.
I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers.
I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
> I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him.
The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.
Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated.
Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable.
So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?
How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat:
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing?
Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems"
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
I suppose someone (even an experienced vimmer) might argue that learning vim is not so much "umwelt-transformative", but rather like "muscle memory training", like LeetCode drilling.
Indeed, basic vim-navigation - (hjkl, w, b) is muscle memory.
But, I'd argue the umwelt shift comes from vim's modal nature and its language of text objects. You start perceiving text as having an inherent grammar - "inside parentheses", "around word", "until comma." Text gains topology and structure that was invisible before.
The transformative part isn't the keystrokes but learning to think "delete inside quotes" (di") or "change around paragraph" (cap). You see text as composable objects with boundaries, not just streams of characters. This may even persists when you're reading on paper.
That mental model often transforms your keyboard workflow not just in your editor - but your WM, terminal, web browser, etc.
Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical.
It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
You're getting a little ahead of yourself. First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality. That is, they need to be true or false, and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify. Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results.
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
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.
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.
I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning, and no one can say what the phrase means.
Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.
What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?
The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.
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...
“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.
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html
Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
> 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.
Related. Others?
What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 - May 2023 (117 comments)
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments)
A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)
>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed".
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states
Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"
edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)
> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.
There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
>Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc.
Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness.
The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms.
To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is.
Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.
Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do?
If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.
That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.
(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.
In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.
How would you describe the distinction?
> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"
Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical trick caused by collapsing a word that usually relates two distinct things ("A is like B") onto a singular "something".
A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words:
"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.
I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
What brought down your level on convinced?
When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers.
I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.
> I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him.
(More Daniel Dennett)
The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.
Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated.
Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable.
So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
But I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat
Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?
How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat:
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing?
Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
The pessimism, the "facts beyond the reach of human concepts".
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
good point, I'd agree sensors are just a piece of the picture
The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems"
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
I suppose someone (even an experienced vimmer) might argue that learning vim is not so much "umwelt-transformative", but rather like "muscle memory training", like LeetCode drilling.
Indeed, basic vim-navigation - (hjkl, w, b) is muscle memory.
But, I'd argue the umwelt shift comes from vim's modal nature and its language of text objects. You start perceiving text as having an inherent grammar - "inside parentheses", "around word", "until comma." Text gains topology and structure that was invisible before.
The transformative part isn't the keystrokes but learning to think "delete inside quotes" (di") or "change around paragraph" (cap). You see text as composable objects with boundaries, not just streams of characters. This may even persists when you're reading on paper.
That mental model often transforms your keyboard workflow not just in your editor - but your WM, terminal, web browser, etc.
Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical.
It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
You're getting a little ahead of yourself. First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality. That is, they need to be true or false, and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify. Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism
And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
> Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around)
Why cannot it?
Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results.
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
If anything, it's getting weirder... real progress looks, well, batshit insane. For example:
Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY
What is it like to be another person?
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.
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.
What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?
I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning, and no one can say what the phrase means.
Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.
True. I suppose every one of us has asked:
What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?
This has puzzled me since childhood.
It's more or less OK, thank you for asking. Recently I felt:
Disappointed when I went somewhere and there wasn't any tea,
Enthralled by a story about someone guarding a mystical treasure alone in a remote museum on a dark and stormy night,
Sympathetic toward a hardworking guy nobody likes, but also aggravated by his bossiness to the point of swearing at him,
Confused due to waking up at 7 pm and not being sure how it happened.
You probably don't entirely understand any of those. What is it to entirely understand something? But you probably get the idea in each case.
Daniel Dennett was the only good part of the "New Atheism" movement. May he rest in peace.
The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here.