| I'm going to ignore the issues of mind/body dualism since they are
orthogonal to the argument I want to make about Nagel's bat. The short version is that if we can approximate the sensory experience
and the motor experience of an organism, and we can successively
refine that approximation as measured by similarity in behavior
between bat and man-bad, then I would argue that we can in fact
imagine what it is like to be a bat. In short, it is a Chinese Bat Room argument. If you put a human
controlling a robot bat and a bat in two boxes and then ask someone to
determine which is the human and which is the bat, when science can no
longer tell the difference (because we have refined the human/bat
interface sufficiently) you can ask the human controlling the robot
bat to write down their experience and it would be strikingly similar
to what the bat would say if we could teach it English. The bat case is actually easier than one might suppose, similarly say,
a jumping spider, because we can translate their sensory inputs to our
nervous system and if we tune our reward system and motor system so
that we can get even an approximate set of inputs and similar set of
actuators, then we can experience what it is like to be a bat. Further, if I improve the fidelity of the experimental man-bat
simulation rig, the experience will likewise converge. While we will
not be able to truly be a bat since that is asymptotically mutually
exclusive with our biology, the fact that we can build systems that
allow progressive approach to bat sensory motor experience means that
we actually do have the ability to image the experience of other
beings. That is, our experiences are converging and differ only due to
our lack of our technical ability to overcome the limitations of our
biological differences. The harder case is when we literally don't have the molecule that is
used to detect something, as in the tetrachormat case. That said one
of my friends has always wanted to find a way to do an experiment
where a trichromat can somehow have the new photo receptor expressed
in one eye and see what happens. The general argument about why we would expect something similar to
happen should the technical hurdles be overcome is because basically
all nervous systems wire themselves up by learning. Therefore, as long
as the input and output ranges can be mapped to something that a human
can learn, then a human nervous system should likewise converge to be
able to sense and produce those inputs and outputs (modulo certain
critical periods in neural development, though even those can be
overcome, e.g. language acquisition by slowing down speech for adults). Some technical hurdle examples. Converting a trichromat into a
tetrachormat by crispering someone's left eye. Learning dolphin by
slowing down dolphin speech in time while also providing a way for
humans to produce dolphin high frequency speech via some transform on
the human orofacial vocal system. There are limitations when we can't
literally dilate time, but I supposed if we are going all the way, we
can accelerate the human to the fraction of the speed of light that
will compensate for the fact that the human motor system can't quite
operate fast enough to allow a rapid fire conversation with a dolphin. |