What Is It Like to Be a Bat? - Notes
The Intractability of Consciousness
Consciousness is the primary reason why the mind-body problem remains so difficult.
Current discussions often overlook or misrepresent the significance of consciousness.
Reductionist approaches often sidestep the unique challenges posed by consciousness. Reductionist approaches involve explaining complex phenomena by breaking them down into simpler, more fundamental components. For example, explaining consciousness solely in terms of neural activity, without considering subjective experience, would be a reductionist approach.
Successful reductions in science (e.g., water-H2O) are unlikely to illuminate the mind-brain relation.
Philosophers tend to explain the incomprehensible through familiar terms, leading to implausible accounts of the mental.
The Nature of Consciousness
Without consciousness, the mind-body problem would be far less complex.
Conscious experience is widespread in the animal kingdom, though difficult to verify in simpler organisms.
The essence of consciousness is that there is "something it is like" to be a particular organism.
This "subjective character of experience" cannot be captured by reductive analyses, functional states, or intentional states.
The subjective character of experience is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior.
Any reductionist analysis must address what is being reduced; otherwise, the problem is misrepresented.
Physicalism requires an explicit account of the subjective character of mental phenomena. Physicalism is the view that everything that exists is ultimately physical, or that there are no things besides physical things. In this context, it means mental states are ultimately physical states and needs to account for subjective experience.
The Subjective and the Objective
Facts about what it is like to be an X are unique and raise doubts about their reality or significance.
The connection between subjectivity and a point of view highlights the importance of subjective features.
It is difficult to exclude the phenomenological features of experience from reduction by explaining them as effects on the minds of human observers. Phenomenological features refer to the subjective aspects of experience, or what it feels like to have a certain experience. For example, the redness of red or the feeling of pain are phenomenological features.
If physicalism is correct phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account.
Subjective phenomena are essentially linked to a specific point of view and an objective theory will inevitably abandon this point of view.
The Case of the Bat
Bats are mammals with experiences, but their sensory apparatus (echolocation) is very different from ours.
Bat sonar is not subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.
We are limited to our own experiences when trying to understand what it is like to be a bat.
Imagining behaving like a bat is different from knowing what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
Extrapolation from our own case is incomplete, so we can only form a schematic conception.
We can ascribe general types of experiences based on structure/behavior: pain, fear, hunger, lust, perception, and sonar.This means that by observing the physical structure and behavior of an organism, we can infer that it is likely to have certain general types of experiences. For example, if an animal has nociceptors (pain receptors) and exhibits behaviors indicative of avoiding harm, we can infer that it experiences pain.
These experiences still have a specific subjective character beyond our ability to conceive. Even though we can infer the general types of experiences an organism might have, the specific subjective quality of these experiences remains beyond our ability to fully understand or imagine. For example, while we can infer that a bat experiences pain, we cannot know exactly what that experience is like for the bat itself. The precise way pain feels to a bat, with its unique sensory apparatus and cognitive framework, is inaccessible to us.
Limits of Human Understanding
Conscious life elsewhere in the universe may not be describable in our experiential terms.
The subjective experience of a deaf-blind person is inaccessible to someone who can see and hear.
Intelligent bats or Martians might find it impossible to conceive what it's like to be human due to the structure of their minds.
The English expression "what it is like" does not mean "what it resembles in our experience" but rather "how it is for the subject himself."
Facts exist beyond the reach of human concepts.
There may be facts that humans could never represent or comprehend, given the limits of our structure.
Reflection on bat experience leads to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. This means that reflecting on how bats experience the world shows us that there are truths and realities that cannot be fully captured or expressed using human language or concepts.
Point of View and the Mind-Body Problem
Facts about experience (what it's like) embody a particular point of view.
The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual (it is a type). While the experience of 'what it's like' is subjective, it's not entirely unique to each individual. Instead, it represents a shared type of experience that many can relate to. For example, while your experience of seeing the color blue might be slightly different from mine, we both understand the general concept and feeling associated with 'blueness.'
Phenomenological facts are objective in that one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is if they are similar enough to adopt the other's point of view. Even though experiences are subjective, if people are alike enough, one can understand and talk about what the other person is going through by imagining what it's like.
The greater the difference from oneself, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.
The physical operation of an organism can be observed and understood from many points of view. Comparatively to the difficulty to truly understand what it's like to be the organism in question.
There are no imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists (and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will).
Objectivity and Reduction
A Martian scientist could understand physical phenomena (rainbows, lightning) without understanding human concepts or phenomenal world.
Lightning has an objective character beyond its visual appearance, accessible without vision.
Objectivity is a direction in which understanding can travel, moving away from a human viewpoint.
It is difficult to understand the objective character of an experience, apart from the subject's point of view.
What would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?
If experiences are purely subjective and lack any objective properties, it raises the question of how an external observer, like a Martian, could study brain processes that produce these subjective experiences. It challenges the idea of understanding mental states from a completely objective, third-person perspective.
The Difficulty of Psychophysical Reduction
Reduction involves greater objectivity, reducing dependence on individual or species-specific viewpoints. When trying to understand something scientifically, the goal is to move away from personal feelings and individual perspectives, aiming for explanations based on objective facts.
Scientific descriptions move from how things appear to our senses to focus on general effects and properties that can be detected through various methods.
Experience does not fit this pattern; the idea of moving from appearance to reality makes no sense.
It is unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us.
A shift to greater objectivity does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon.
In discovering sound as a wave phenomenon, we leave behind the auditory viewpoint, which remains unreduced.
The neobehaviorism substitutes an objective concept of mind for the real thing, in order to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced. This theory tries to explain the mind only in terms of observable behavior, ignoring real inner experiences. This makes the mind easier to "reduce" to science, but it leaves out what's most important, what it feels like to be conscious.
A physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience.
The Mystery of Physical Processes and Experience
If mental processes are physical processes, then there is something it is like to undergo certain physical processes, this point remains a mystery.
The Problem with Physicalism
Physicalism may be a position we cannot understand because we lack a conception of how it might be true. We don’t really get how physical stuff (like brain cells) can create something like thoughts or feelings — it’s hard to imagine how physicalism could be true.
The meaning of physicalism (mental states are states of the body) seems clear, but the apparent clarity of "is" is deceptive. Saying "the mind is the brain" sounds simple, but that word “is” hides a big mystery. It doesn’t explain how experiences and brain activity are actually the same thing.
When terms of identification are disparate, it may not be clear how it could be true (e.g. All matter is really energy). Sometimes, two things that seem very different turn out to be the same (like matter and energy), but it’s hard to understand how. Same with mind and body — they seem so different, it’s unclear how they could be one thing.
Without a theoretical framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification. If we don’t have a good theory to explain how mind and body are the same, it just feels mysterious and unclear.
We may have evidence for something we cannot really understand. We might see that brain activity and thoughts are linked, but still not understand how the physical stuff creates the feeling of experience.
Mental events having physical causes and effects implies they must have physical descriptions, even if we lack a psychophysical theory. If thoughts can cause physical things (like moving your arm), they must somehow be physical too — even if we don’t yet know how to describe that link.
The Objective Character of Experience
Very little work addresses whether experiences can have an objective character at all.
Does it make sense to ask what experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?
A Speculative Proposal: Objective Phenomenology
Pursue a more objective understanding of the mental in its own right, setting aside the mind-brain relation.
Form new concepts and devise a new method: an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.
Describe the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.
Develop concepts to explain to a blind person what it is like to see.
Structural features of perception might be more accessible to objective description.
A phenomenology that is in this sense objective may permit questions about the physical basis of experience to assume a more intelligible form.
It seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective.