[randallsquared]

> I assume we all believe that bats have experience.

Humorously enough, earlier he refers to those who believe that non-human mammals are not all conscious people as "extremists", so it's clear he understands this is not a fully accurate assumption.

Two separate meanings of "have experience" are being swapped interchangeably, I think: one is "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions", and one is all that plus "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing", which is to say, a person. What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat, but that doesn't actually imply that bats implement or contain a personal point of view. If they don't, then it might be that there is no "what it is like to be a bat", but at most "what it is like to experience being a bat as a person implemented by a system which is not a bat".

[why_at]

I think he makes it pretty clear he's only talking about the second one of your two definitions

>What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat

He says:

>[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

The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?

[simiones]

> The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?

This is definitely a possibility given the very basic level of understanding we have of this. The reality is that we don't know, and we don't even have a well defined way to know (that is, we don't even have any idea what kind of proof we would need to bring that animals have an experience of the world in some sense that is the same as ours but different from a rock's).

[bobson381]

I'm with Alan Watts. It's consciousness all the way down, in a unified, Spinozan, sense. A rock feels rock like you feel you, just in rock ways. Tat Tvam Asi, in a way.

It's useful for us to have the concept of separateness, like it's useful for us to have the concept of names, or a foot, or dollars, etc. But it doesn't mean things really are separate.

[solumunus]

We don’t know, in the same way that we don’t know that there is no God… It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.

[simiones]

> It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.

I don't think this is a fair statement. I also happen to believe that there are no gods and that most animals have subjective experiences in some sense similar to our own (while I also believe that atoms and rocks don't), but I don't really think there is a meaningful probability you can associate with either position.

[solumunus]

That they don’t experience anything would be a more shocking revelation to almost everyone, I think.

[randallsquared]

If I was certain that bats had a subjective experience of the world, it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer. Since we don't understand how personal experience happens in humans, yet, I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.

[why_at]

>it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer.

Okay, I think this is part of what I found confusing about your initial comment, since "person" is often used interchangeably with "human". But if you're using it to mean something that has a subjective experience then that's fine.

>I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.

This sounds like it would put you with the "extremists" then? It's widely agreed that all mammals if not all vertebrates have some subjective experience, consciousness, sentience, or whatever you want to call it.[1][2] As you've said though we can't be fully sure.

Do you think any non-humans have this?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

[2]https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou...

[aahs]

I don't know what you mean to say by claiming the distinction. Can you prove to me that you have a richer first person perspective than a bat? Or if that's too hard can you convincingly demonstrate that the bat doesn't have a richer first person perspective than you? If no to both it's all needles empty speculation and self aggrandisement.

[randallsquared]

I don't know with complete certainty that there IS a distinction, to be sure, since I don't know how consciousness/subjectivity/personhood works. Every previous grouping of entities we've accepted as people have said so themselves.

[kbrkbr]

> "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions"

vs

> "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing"

I think you are making a distinction without a difference. "Sense the world", "act", "plan" - that can only figuratively attributed to "the brain".

The concepts are already tied to what is named in the second opposition.

[randallsquared]

In the first phrase, thermostat can substitute for "brain". A thermostat has a sense of (or "method of collecting data about") something not in the thermostat, and can react to changes in data reported by that sense, and some can plan changes based on expected future reports. None of that requires a person interior to the thermostat receiving that data and processing it.

[kbrkbr]

I disagree. You can sense something using a thermostat. The thermostat is just a tool based on a functional relationship. "Sensing" has no literal, unequivocal use here.

[randallsquared]

You asked in what way I was using "sense" differently from "has a subjective experience of". My reply was that I was using it to effectively mean "collect data about". I don't have much interest in arguing that "sense" means one thing or the other, but I can reword my initial statement which you quoted as

> "brain can collect data about the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions"

without any harm to my intended meaning, and without requiring you to agree that "sense" doesn't necessarily include subjective experience.

[MarceliusK]

A bat might not have a "personal point of view" in the human sense, but that doesn't mean there is no point of view at all

[abc123abc123]

The question is ultimately meaningless. All we have are actions and reactions, and brain scans. We can talk perfectly well based on that, although, it will be a bit cumbersome.

All the qualia, subjective stuff etc. is just shorthand, for whta ultimately boils down to actions in the world.

[kbrkbr]

That already presupposes a very narrow idea of what's meaningful that is quite far away from everyday life, where we talk about and evaluate subjective experiences all the time.

How do we talk about ethics in terms of actions, reactions abd brain scans please? That looks like an uncovered check.

In what sense are they a shorthand for actions in the world?

[abc123abc123]

Ethics is just code for expressing how we feel about things. There is no "ethic" in nature, just the words we say to express it. Every day life, and the way we talk about it, _is_ far away, many layers of abstractions, and that was precisely my point. Thank you for providing an example.

[kbrkbr]

That's one opinion out of many. Some say so, some say so.

But you did not answer my question on how we talk about ethics in terms of actions and brain scans.

The devil is in the details, and when you try to express why it is bad to kill people over a small argument in terms of actions etc., then you might find that this is not as simple as you insinuated.

"There is no 'ethic' in nature" is also easy said in the armchair, but becomes a lifeless abstraction pretty fast when confronted with real human suffering and tears.

[pandoro]

This raises an interesting question: is experience possible without a "point of view" as you call it; without any subject, only sensing and reacting? I don't think so. A purely reactive system cannot experience the world. Subjective experience requires an object to be experienced and a subject experiencing the object. In the case of the bat, the object(s) being experienced are all the signals coming from the sense organs of the bat plus the inner chatter of the bat's mind (if they have some). The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.

[randallsquared]

> The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.

That's the question, is it not? We don't know how that "subject" is implemented in humans, but assuming we figure it out, we'll be able to see if that process is happening in other brains as well.

[pandoro]

That might be too much of an assumption to make because of the binding problem. Imaging knowing absolutely everything there is to know - measurably, quantifiably, down to atomic/quantum states - about what happens when a human sees red but only having experienced a black and white world. Do you learn anything new when seeing a cherry for the first time? You experience red for the first time. Measurement is third-person by definition, and consciousness is irreducibly first-person. So no instrument, however precise, can ever close that gap. Consciousness/"the subject" is the raw material of reality. Matter, sensory inputs and mind are experienced as objects in consciousness not the other way around. So in that sense "the subject" is exactly the same for the bat or the human.

[randallsquared]

> Measurement is third-person by definition, and consciousness is irreducibly first-person. So no instrument, however precise, can ever close that gap.

In a "logical proof" sense, yes.

However, that doesn't stop us from being able to experiment and understand consciousness, any more than it stops us from understanding the rest of the world around us. For example, "readiness potential" experiments, and the reliable cessation of consciousness under anesthesia.

[pandoro]

Interesting examples, thanks for the nice discussion!

I believe it goes deeper than the "logical proof" sense. It's a category mistake. Consciousness can never be "objectified".

About the readiness potential I'd argue that it's still happening in consciousness just not being registered by the mind of the participant. In the experiment "conscious decision" or "unconscious brain activities" are misnomers. Thoughts, decisions, memory, latent biases, etc. are processes of the mind not of consciousness.

Anesthesia and deep sleep are also useful scenarios to investigate. There is an interesting question to contemplate for those examples: are they an absence of experience or an experience of absence? I'd contend that it's the experience of the complete cessation of all workings of the mind and sense organs. But consciousness is still there. Otherwise how would you experience the transition from waking state to deep sleep/anesthesia and then back to waking?