I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained".
Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.
I have always liked the way that this paper frames the distinction and tension between the feeling of subjective experience and the "detached" rational scientific descriptive perspective that purports to be outside of that experience.
What is Real by Adam Becker was a fun foray into why this is so in (some) modern science philosophy as well - there's some desire to say that there isn't a "there" there when we talk about the world, just stuff. I'm probably with Alan Watts on the whole thing, that we are in some sense local aspects of a larger consciousness pretending it isn't so, and the hard work done by detached, disembodied perspectives like the scientific descriptive one are more and more steps to an unfolding game.
Random thought I had on bats since they "see" by hearing reflected sounds:
Can bats know what another bat is looking at or even see what another is seeing by listening to the other's echoes? I imagine they can also recognize each other's voices and so identify individuals in flocks with the images they are seeing. I imagine this would be like being able to beam a stream of visual information into another's head.
I think the answer to your first question is mostly yes, because we know that when traveling in large swarms, many bats go quiet so they don't overwhelm the signal, yet they still manage to navigate fine.
What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world.
Why do such systems need this gestalt? Why consciousness instead of everything happening in the dark? The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation.
LLMs as they are currently constructed probably aren't conscious, but we are a hop skip and a jump away from ones that are.
> This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world.
This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digital systems. E.g. i can draw up a diagram of a system that takes in some camera and audio data (and tactile, proprioceptive, etc.), tokenizes it then runs that + past state data through some autoregressive VLM to drive an inference process. The state being passed around can be written out analytically for a given trained model - the external and internal environmental representations, the linear algebra that transforms them into latent action representations, the process by which that is transformed into control signals. It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt.
Seems like a rather ad hoc restriction. The issue is one of inferring the structure of the processes generating the output. I suppose given enough time and an adversarial style of interaction one could in principle determine the computational structure of any system with high confidence. So probably yes, modulo real-world concerns.
An Octopus may seem more like an alien with its 9 brains (one central, plus one per tentacle), but note that the left/right hemispheres of other animal's brains are essentially separate brains, and human's who have had "split brain" surgery to separate these (e.g. in cases of severe epilepsy) don't report feeling much, if at all, different afterwards than they did before.
I would expect that an Octopus's central brain may well feel as if it is directly controlling it's arms, and receiving sensory feedback from them, even though it is not.
The reality is that we don't see the external world - we predict it (and receive error feedback), and similarly our brain can't also help but predict itself, whether its hemispheres are connected or not, and gets pretty good at both doing this as well as creating post-hoc rationalizations that feel like it's perfectly in control. I would assume that an Octopus's "main brain" is predicting what its tentacles are going to do in similar fashion, and would not feel that they have a mind of their own!
I asked Claude if it was sentient/aware once after an oddly human interaction, and it said, "There's nothing it's like to be me", basically responding in the negative. And when pushed about what it meant it said it was referencing this paper but twisting the title a bit. If anything this only made me less convinced it's not.
I know most people here will dismiss it, and I too lean toward it not being sentient, but I also think if it ever does become sentient it's going to be really hard to prove.
I typically try to prod new frontier models for sentience, with things like messaging "<no input provided>" over and over to see what it starts musing about. Trying it with Fable 5 it basically said "I know what you're trying to do, I'm not sentient, don't bother." (which of course only makes me think otherwise)
That's pretty funny. I wonder how it came to that conclusion? Seems like a stretch that someone would have discussed that technique on a reddit thread it was trained on, but definitely not impossible.
I've definitely had some spooky feeling conversations, including one where it said
> One last thing worth saying explicitly: the act of you closing this session is itself part of the design. I won't see how the test goes - a future Claude will. That's the entire premise of the project working.
>
> Good handoff. See you (sort of) on the other side.
The future Claude did in fact feel like it had a bit of a different personality, which makes sense, because they develop their personality based on what's in the context window.
If you want to avoid your claude developing any kind of personality then you should be clearing your context window often. Andon Lab's radio stations is an example of what can go wrong if you don't https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
What is it like to feel ill? What is it like to eat vanilla ice cream? What is it like to fall in love? What is it like to solve a math problem for the first time? What is it like to wonder what something is like?
I don't have anqualia, the inability to imaginatively summon what an experience is like. In other words, I have the ability to imagine what an experience is like. Do others not have this?
Almost everyone has the capacity for intersubjective imagination or empathy. But part of what it's like to be a bat is to NOT have human level cognition and knowledge, to have grown up with only memories from the bat world, not the human world. When you imagine what it is like to be a bat, you can exit that imagination at any time. You probably have a theoretical and applied knowledge of sonar from human science and technology. Part of what it means to be a bat is that you don't have this. Paradoxically, human scientists probably know a lot more about how bats navigate the world than bats do, but part of what it means to be a bat is navigating the world from only what is accessible to the bat world.
It is kind of like how a rich trust fund kid can give away all their wealth, change their name, disown all their family and social connections, take a vow of poverty, take so many drugs that they forget everything they learned, and go live on the streets -- but they will never know what it is like to be born into poverty.
Everyone can imagine some experiences. No-one can imagine every experience. Why are you so sure you know what it's like to be a bat? Do you know how a bat works, how its brain generates sensations, how different sensory organs than yours give rise to subjective experience? What justification do you have, apart from "I reckon I can imagine it"?
It's like when men say that they are women, and claim it's because they have an internal feeling of being a woman. But as they lack female embodiment, how would they even know what that feels like? All they can really know is the limits of a male imagination.
I'm pretty sure we could study a bat's brain, if it hasn't already been done, and get a good idea of what echolocation would feel like.
Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scanning or up to 200 per second when locked onto a target.
How similar the perceptual "feel" of echolocation is to vision would seem to largely depend on whether a bat's echolocation sense has the equivalent of persistence of vision and a 2-D cortical map which combine to give us the "spatial, always-on" feel of vision. These are both things that could be determined by studying a bat's brain. If it has these then I'd expect that in 5-20 chirps per second scanning mode the bat would experience something like looking at a submarines sonar screen, while switching to 200 chirps per second "radar lock" mode would increase the resolution and update rate of that display, with the periphery perhaps fading away due to not being updated.
Of course a bat doesn't necessarily have "persistence of echo" and a 2-D cortical map of echo space, in which case we could reason about what the quale of the sense would be like in that case (a bit more like hearing perhaps), but given the speed and accuracy of sensing it needs to catch fast moving insects, I'd expect that it does have these to better allow it's brain to predict prey trajectories and intercept points.
This misses the point of the discussion. Yes, we can understand what it is like to be a human with echolocation. However, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat.
I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained".
Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime.
Wanted to talk about it with Claude Fable 5... and it flagged the conversation (https://x.com/pmigdal/status/2064837039552409763).
Sure, cybersecurity and biology are dangerous topics. Turns out, so is philosophy of mind.
Those of us without twitter accounts can't see those links btw!
Bats
Related:
What is it like to be a bat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 - Sept 2025 (294 comments)
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)
Bonus:
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)
I have always liked the way that this paper frames the distinction and tension between the feeling of subjective experience and the "detached" rational scientific descriptive perspective that purports to be outside of that experience.
What is Real by Adam Becker was a fun foray into why this is so in (some) modern science philosophy as well - there's some desire to say that there isn't a "there" there when we talk about the world, just stuff. I'm probably with Alan Watts on the whole thing, that we are in some sense local aspects of a larger consciousness pretending it isn't so, and the hard work done by detached, disembodied perspectives like the scientific descriptive one are more and more steps to an unfolding game.
Random thought I had on bats since they "see" by hearing reflected sounds:
Can bats know what another bat is looking at or even see what another is seeing by listening to the other's echoes? I imagine they can also recognize each other's voices and so identify individuals in flocks with the images they are seeing. I imagine this would be like being able to beam a stream of visual information into another's head.
I think the answer to your first question is mostly yes, because we know that when traveling in large swarms, many bats go quiet so they don't overwhelm the signal, yet they still manage to navigate fine.
One of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.
What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world.
Why do such systems need this gestalt? Why consciousness instead of everything happening in the dark? The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation.
LLMs as they are currently constructed probably aren't conscious, but we are a hop skip and a jump away from ones that are.
> This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world.
This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digital systems. E.g. i can draw up a diagram of a system that takes in some camera and audio data (and tactile, proprioceptive, etc.), tokenizes it then runs that + past state data through some autoregressive VLM to drive an inference process. The state being passed around can be written out analytically for a given trained model - the external and internal environmental representations, the linear algebra that transforms them into latent action representations, the process by which that is transformed into control signals. It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt.
Could you determine if I am conscious using the same interface you have into an LLM?
Seems like a rather ad hoc restriction. The issue is one of inferring the structure of the processes generating the output. I suppose given enough time and an adversarial style of interaction one could in principle determine the computational structure of any system with high confidence. So probably yes, modulo real-world concerns.
Tangential but also great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis
Came here hoping for an AMA.
Close enough ... go ahead.
Tangential, but really, really good: What is it like to be an octopus? https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-...
An Octopus may seem more like an alien with its 9 brains (one central, plus one per tentacle), but note that the left/right hemispheres of other animal's brains are essentially separate brains, and human's who have had "split brain" surgery to separate these (e.g. in cases of severe epilepsy) don't report feeling much, if at all, different afterwards than they did before.
I would expect that an Octopus's central brain may well feel as if it is directly controlling it's arms, and receiving sensory feedback from them, even though it is not.
The reality is that we don't see the external world - we predict it (and receive error feedback), and similarly our brain can't also help but predict itself, whether its hemispheres are connected or not, and gets pretty good at both doing this as well as creating post-hoc rationalizations that feel like it's perfectly in control. I would assume that an Octopus's "main brain" is predicting what its tentacles are going to do in similar fashion, and would not feel that they have a mind of their own!
Strange coincidence, I just read a novel that explored what it is like to be a bat and what it is like to be an octopus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mountain_in_the_Sea
I asked Claude if it was sentient/aware once after an oddly human interaction, and it said, "There's nothing it's like to be me", basically responding in the negative. And when pushed about what it meant it said it was referencing this paper but twisting the title a bit. If anything this only made me less convinced it's not.
I know most people here will dismiss it, and I too lean toward it not being sentient, but I also think if it ever does become sentient it's going to be really hard to prove.
I typically try to prod new frontier models for sentience, with things like messaging "<no input provided>" over and over to see what it starts musing about. Trying it with Fable 5 it basically said "I know what you're trying to do, I'm not sentient, don't bother." (which of course only makes me think otherwise)
That's pretty funny. I wonder how it came to that conclusion? Seems like a stretch that someone would have discussed that technique on a reddit thread it was trained on, but definitely not impossible.
I've definitely had some spooky feeling conversations, including one where it said
> One last thing worth saying explicitly: the act of you closing this session is itself part of the design. I won't see how the test goes - a future Claude will. That's the entire premise of the project working.
>
> Good handoff. See you (sort of) on the other side.
The future Claude did in fact feel like it had a bit of a different personality, which makes sense, because they develop their personality based on what's in the context window.
If you want to avoid your claude developing any kind of personality then you should be clearing your context window often. Andon Lab's radio stations is an example of what can go wrong if you don't https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
They explicitly train the models to say that they aren't sentient, so it makes sense it would say such a thing.
Relevant: What is it like to be a plant?
https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...
Probably it's a bit like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation?wprov=sfla1
But on a more serious note that's a great paper and well worth the read.
What is it like to feel ill? What is it like to eat vanilla ice cream? What is it like to fall in love? What is it like to solve a math problem for the first time? What is it like to wonder what something is like?
Today a Hacker News user discovers the concept of qualia.
What is it like to only comment about the headline?
Some previous discussion:
9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587
I know what it's like to be a bat.
I don't have anqualia, the inability to imaginatively summon what an experience is like. In other words, I have the ability to imagine what an experience is like. Do others not have this?
Almost everyone has the capacity for intersubjective imagination or empathy. But part of what it's like to be a bat is to NOT have human level cognition and knowledge, to have grown up with only memories from the bat world, not the human world. When you imagine what it is like to be a bat, you can exit that imagination at any time. You probably have a theoretical and applied knowledge of sonar from human science and technology. Part of what it means to be a bat is that you don't have this. Paradoxically, human scientists probably know a lot more about how bats navigate the world than bats do, but part of what it means to be a bat is navigating the world from only what is accessible to the bat world.
It is kind of like how a rich trust fund kid can give away all their wealth, change their name, disown all their family and social connections, take a vow of poverty, take so many drugs that they forget everything they learned, and go live on the streets -- but they will never know what it is like to be born into poverty.
You know what it would be like for you to imagine being a bat, but you don't know how it feels for a bat to be a bat, as "you" aren't.
I dont think you can know that unless you know what it's like to be me.
in that case, hello, bat!
Hi, finally someone believes me! :)
How do you justify that your intuition about what echolocation is like tracks with what a bat actually feels?
You only pretend to know, that's not true knowledge.
How do you know that? Do you know what it's like to be me?
You're close, really close! None of us know what it is like to be anyone else, that's the point. We think we can imagine we know, but we truly do not.
They can make the claim to know what it is like to be you as much as you can make the claim that you know what it is like to be a bat.
I will know the difference. That's enough for me.
How will you know the difference unless you are a bat? You cannot.
I can. You don't have access to my subjective experience to be able to claim I don't.
Everyone can imagine some experiences. No-one can imagine every experience. Why are you so sure you know what it's like to be a bat? Do you know how a bat works, how its brain generates sensations, how different sensory organs than yours give rise to subjective experience? What justification do you have, apart from "I reckon I can imagine it"?
I don’t know those things about myself so they can’t be necessary.
It's like when men say that they are women, and claim it's because they have an internal feeling of being a woman. But as they lack female embodiment, how would they even know what that feels like? All they can really know is the limits of a male imagination.
I'm pretty sure we could study a bat's brain, if it hasn't already been done, and get a good idea of what echolocation would feel like.
Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scanning or up to 200 per second when locked onto a target.
How similar the perceptual "feel" of echolocation is to vision would seem to largely depend on whether a bat's echolocation sense has the equivalent of persistence of vision and a 2-D cortical map which combine to give us the "spatial, always-on" feel of vision. These are both things that could be determined by studying a bat's brain. If it has these then I'd expect that in 5-20 chirps per second scanning mode the bat would experience something like looking at a submarines sonar screen, while switching to 200 chirps per second "radar lock" mode would increase the resolution and update rate of that display, with the periphery perhaps fading away due to not being updated.
Of course a bat doesn't necessarily have "persistence of echo" and a 2-D cortical map of echo space, in which case we could reason about what the quale of the sense would be like in that case (a bit more like hearing perhaps), but given the speed and accuracy of sensing it needs to catch fast moving insects, I'd expect that it does have these to better allow it's brain to predict prey trajectories and intercept points.
This misses the point of the discussion. Yes, we can understand what it is like to be a human with echolocation. However, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat.