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I think that's an interesting offshoot of the discussion, but I'm not sure that it really affects the argument that much.

Let's say you undergo a process to slowly use your brain's plasticity to get closer and closer to perceiving as a bat. Well, does that help me? Am I able to imagine what it is like to be a bat? Of course not. Well, what if you could talk to me and describe it, then would I have a true understanding of the experience of being a bat? Still no!

Nagel's point isn't about whether we could do anything to make ourselves into bats, it's rather that, when we don't have that qualitative experience, we cannot truly understand what it is like to have that experience.

If anything, the argument works even better now that you've gone and given yourself sonar: you can talk to me, unlike that dumb bat, so you can describe your experiences to me, and yet I will still have no true understanding of the experience itself.

That is (a part of) the Hard Problem of consciousness: that my studying and examining and learning about your conscious experience still does not allow me to understand it.

If anything, the argument works even better now that you've gone and given yourself sonar: you can talk to me, unlike that dumb bat, so you can describe your experiences to me, and yet I will still have no true understanding of the experience itself.

This underlines the suggestion at the very end, we are lacking tools to properly talk about experiences and maybe we could actually develop them. My inability to describe to you, or probably even better to a blind person, what it is like to see a red object may after all not be fundamental. Maybe there is a way to communicate and in turn truly understand what using the tongue device is like, we just have not yet discovered it.

One of the more interesting proposals I was faced with as part of my Cog Sci & AI undergrad was that we do indeed have ways of communicating that subjective/experiential knowledge — knowledge which is otherwise ineffable. Art is one obvious example of this. At its best, art is able to communicate things that a purely propositional language cannot. The same could be said of rituals — participation in a ritual is a formalized way of forcing you to take on specific states of being that convey a kind of knowledge that can only be acquired by embodying it.

This might all sound a little floofy, but it's really not. Think about the deep knowledge conveyed through game simulations. I've never been to space, but thanks to hours and hours of playing Kerbal Space Program, I really do have some sense of what it's like to navigate through space — a knowledge that goes far deeper than if I had only learned all of Kepler's and Newton's laws and equations.

There may be some relationship between that and subjective experience, but it's not really the same thing. You're describing essentially "know how" instead of "know that". But here we're talking about something that doesn't actually seem to be representable in terms of physical

Why is it that there's something it's like to be zukzuk? zukzuk could simply be like a computer program, simply responding to inputs. Or you could simply have an erroneous memory of actually experiencing things (instead, you simply just responded to inputs, one of which was to record an apparently subjective experience). That doesn't seem to solve the problem to me; it's just kicking the can down the road a little.

The distinction between "know how" (aka procedural knowledge) and "know that" (declarative knowledge) is a favourite in cognitive science, but I think it is a bit shallow. I guess the point I'm making here is that "knowing how" is a major part of knowing "what it is like" to be something.

For example, I know how to ride a bike, and that gives me some idea of _what it is like_ to be someone who knows how to ride a bike — an insight I certainly wouldn't have if I only understood the mechanics of bike riding in declarative terms. The fact that I will probably never know what it is like to be a bat has a lot to do with my inability to have the know-how that a bat has (it's very hard to know how to fly and echolocate when you don't have wings nor the appropriate sensory organs). However, I'd argue that an active, deep VR simulation of bat flight might bring you just a little bit closer to having that embodied, subjective knowledge, in a way that studying bat behaviour or anatomy from a purely objective perspective never would.

What it will be like? Series of sounds, which reprogram brain structure to develop image processing networks?

I can't say it sounds plausible.

But does it sound square?

Think about explaining general relativity, quantum chromodynamics, or just the way a second level cache works to a random human from the early stone age. Probably not an easy task. I am not sure if this is actually a fair analogy, describing what seeing red is like is in some sense very different from explaining the theory of general relativity. But on the other hand the situations are also somewhat similar, the stone age guy just does not posses the required language, probably to a large extend math, and knowledge and is unable to look back on several thousand years of human history and innovation that shaped us. Sure, it looks like a stretch to us that we will ever be able to meaningfully convey the experience of seeing a red object, but I am not convinced that this is a given. Intuitively I certainly agree with you, not going to happen, but maybe that is just a lack of imagination.

As a kind of brute-force proof-of-concept: it could be a series of instructions to poke your brain with an electrified needle of how to invoke the same thoughts.

(It could be that they're different locations in your brain that have to be poked than the locations it would take in the sender's brain, but it's not a fundamental obstacle. Either the sender studies your brain to tell you where you should do it, or instructs you how to figure out the right spots.)

I think it's related to Mill's concept of a Competent Judge

What if someone was a bat, turned into a human and retained the memories of being a bat?

http://www.betsymccall.net/edu/philo/higher%20pleasures2.pdf

'''The Nagel question then, is the fact that I experience vision a certain way really an essential aspect of "what it's like to be me?"''' It is an essential aspect of what it is like to be you. (However, there is an ambiguity here about temporal scope. What it is precisely like to be me now is to have precisely the experience I am having now, and what it is like to be me these days is to have the kinds of experiences I have these days, and what it is like to be me over my whole life is to have a similar pattern of experience to me over a whole life.) And it isn't an essential aspect of what it is to be you. (No one would claim that Mary becomes a different person when she sees red for the first time. This is compatible with the claim that, because of the nature of personal identity, it is impossible for a person to undergo certain very radical changes in the nature of their conscious experience.)

'''Or is my consciousness a "further fact"... something running in the background of all my senses, no matter how they are wired (or rewired) over time?''' Your senses are the very faculties that allow the world to world to produce your conscious experience, so it is odd to frame the "hard problem" of consciousness in this way.

In general, neuroplasticity is sort of interesting for the understanding of consciousness, but it seems arguable that in the tongue experiment you are just experiencing the same qualia you have always experienced; it isn't like seeing colors for the first time.

Now I would be interested in the following experiment. Teach someone blind from birth to see with this tongue device, then restore eyesight with a surgery and test if they can recognize shapes. Why? I once read about an experiment where they restored eyesight of a person blind from birth and the person was unable to identify shapes by looking at them. The subject could easily identify the shapes by touching them, knew how a round ball or the corners of a cube felt, but that was obviously not enough to figure out what a corner looks like. I wonder if the tongue device would be sufficient to provide such an understanding.

How long did they wait for the person to learn?

They did this immediately after the surgery, I am pretty sure the person soon learned what different shapes look like. They just wanted to test whether an understanding of shapes by touching them transfers to an understanding of what they look like. I will try to find the experiment in case you are interested in the details.

EDIT: Did not find the specific study I was thinking of but this is known as Molyneux's problem [1] and there are several sources mentioned in the article.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/molyneux-problem/

Interestingly, Nagel actually seems to acknowledge/anticipate this point on page 9, see reply to sibling:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13999907

Cool, thanks for the links.

It ended up on HN because philosophy is what I studied in college/grad school, and I like the fact that HN seems to be a very intellectually omnivorous community -- sans the annoying dilettantism you find elsewhere.