What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]

bobson381

I have always liked the way that this paper frames the distinction and tension between the feeling of subjective experience and the "detached" rational scientific descriptive perspective that purports to be outside of that experience. What is Real by Adam Becker was a fun foray into why this is so in (some) modern science philosophy as well - there's some desire to say that there isn't a "there" there when we talk about the world, just stuff. I'm probably with Alan Watts on the whole thing, that we are in some sense local aspects of a larger consciousness pretending it isn't so, and the hard work done by detached, disembodied perspectives like the scientific descriptive one are more and more steps to an unfolding game.

kelseyfrog

I know what it's like to be a bat. I don't have anqualia, the inability to imaginatively summon what an experience is like. In other words, I have the ability to imagine what an experience is like. Do others not have this?

justonceokay

One of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.

indoordin0saur

Random thought I had on bats since they "see" by hearing reflected sounds: Can bats know what another bat is looking at or even see what another is seeing by listening to the other's echoes? I imagine they can also recognize each other's voices and so identify individuals in flocks with the images they are seeing. I imagine this would be like being able to beam a stream of visual information into another's head.

jmdeon

I asked Claude if it was sentient/aware once after an oddly human interaction, and it said, "There's nothing it's like to be me", basically responding in the negative. And when pushed about what it meant it said it was referencing this paper but twisting the title a bit. If anything this only made me less convinced it's not. I know most people here will dismiss it, and I too lean toward it not being sentient, but I also think if it ever does become sentient it's going to be really hard to prove.

WastedCucumber

Probably it's a bit like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation?wprov=sfla1 But on a more serious note that's a great paper and well worth the read.

ChrisArchitect

Some previous discussion: 9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587

hmokiguess

Tangential but also great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis

smallerfish

Relevant: What is it like to be a plant? https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...

lisper

What is it like to feel ill? What is it like to eat vanilla ice cream? What is it like to fall in love? What is it like to solve a math problem for the first time? What is it like to wonder what something is like?

allenrb

Came here hoping for an AMA.

stared

I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained". Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime .

freejoe76

Tangential, but really, really good: What is it like to be an octopus? https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-...

HarHarVeryFunny

I'm pretty sure we could study a bat's brain, if it hasn't already been done, and get a good idea of what echolocation would feel like. Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scanning or up to 200 per second when locked onto a target. How similar the perceptual "feel" of echolocation is to vision would seem to largely depend on whether a bat's echolocation sense has the equivalent of persistence of vision and a 2-D cortical map which combine to give us the "spatial, always-on" feel of vision. These are both things that could be determined by studying a bat's brain. If it has these then I'd expect that in 5-20 chirps per second scanning mode the bat would experience something like looking at a submarines sonar screen, while switching to 200 chirps per second "radar lock" mode would increase the resolution and update rate of that display, with the periphery perhaps fading away due to not being updated. Of course a bat doesn't necessarily have "persistence of echo" and a 2-D cortical map of echo space, in which case we could reason about what the quale of the sense would be like in that case (a bit more like hearing perhaps), but given the speed and accuracy of sensing it needs to catch fast moving insects, I'd expect that it does have these to better allow it's brain to predict prey trajectories and intercept points.

hackinthebochs

What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt? Why consciousness instead of everything happening in the dark? The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation. LLMs as they are currently constructed probably aren't conscious, but we are a hop skip and a jump away from ones that are.

dang

Related: What is it like to be a bat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592 - Sept 2025 (294 comments) What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587 - May 2023 (117 comments) What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13998867 - March 2017 (95 comments) Bonus: A browser game inspired by Thomas Nagle's Essay “What is it like to be a bat?” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8622829 - Nov 2014 (3 comments)

evan_

A topic more recently explored by a young Australian researcher: https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-1/fruitbat/

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".

dwd

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.

visarga

I think we have a pretty good explanation today - it's like embeddings from AI models. Experience is both content and reference, we represent new experience in relation to old experience. That makes representation personal, being made of one's own past experience. This does not explain away pure feeling, but explains how we make discriminations of similarity and difference between our experiences, the contents of qualia, the qualitative aspects. We also know brains are locked inside a bone box only connected to the outside world by a bundle of unlabeled nerves, there is no direct access. So the brain can only compare patterns of signals it receives from outside. But since this representation-action-learning loop is recursive it cannot be inhabited or known from outside, 3p needs to pay the price of recursion to execute in order to get to 1p. The gap is that between description and execution, which cannot be crossed for free with cheap description. Execution costs, and that cost is part of what is like being a bat. We can't inhabit their cost pressures since we don't have their context and body. You can't remove the costs of being a bat from "what it is like being a bat" and still get your answer from the comfort of the philosophical armchair.