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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

For a non-bat to experience what it is like to be a bat, you have to embrace one of two philosophies: - Dualism: body and soul/consciousness are separate), or - Panpsychism: consciousness is fundamental and doesn't emerge from the material physiology.

For a materialist, and someone who thinks consciousness arises from the physical aspects, the idea of a human experiencing bat consciousness is not possible. Our evolution developed algorithm for processing the world is wired to our senses. Similarly a bat's perception of the world has evolved along with bat senses and is not the same as ours.

Without any of the evolutionary pre-wiring, a human conscious dropped into a bat would be deaf, dumb and blind.

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The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness.

> "In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

This is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not a bat.

This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be you, the commenter. As I am writing this, I am imagining a consciousness on the other side of the monitor that is somewhat like me. But this is just my consciousness extending itself and imagining another consciousness within its own consciousness.

> If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat".

This is what makes the question so difficult. The human would experience what is like for a bat to be a bat but in the context of human understanding and consciousness. It already makes too little sense so maybe an analogy to attaching a debugger is getting close? Or "running a bat" as a VM or inside a sandbox in the human mind hypervisor, one brain brain hemisphere is the bat (with virtual peripherals), the other observes and experiences everything as a human.

But in the end the goal would be to have the full bat experience on your own skin and perception, and then process it as a human to understand as a human would.

But when you look at brain organoids they quickly find themselves able to play video games as complex as Doom.

This seems like a clear false dichotomy.

The point isn't that a human could literally sample bat experience. It's that if bat experience exists, it is tied to a form of embodiment and perception that we can describe externally but not fully inhabit subjectively

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