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What is it like to be a bat? October 4, 2000 Insofar 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...
- Thomas Nagel
In order to take the above request seriously, one must assume that bats have experience and consciousness. Assuming so, one must then imagine the consciousness that a bat must live with. Its brain is "designed to correlate outgoing impulses with subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables the bat to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision." (Whereas we humans rely on sight to create our vision of the universe, bats rely on sound.) Because any argument of any creature's existence must be based on the human epistemology, the question is now not how bats perceive the universe, but how a bat's perception compares to the human perception. Such a comparison may never be genuine or correct, but by extrapolation and imagination, one could very well formulate an account of "what it is like for a bat to be a bat." Rene Descartes said that the individual self, the first thing that anyone can know for certain, is nothing else but the thinking self, the self that is aware of itself - aware of its own existence. Is a bat aware of its own existence? If a bat is not aware of its own existence, then the above question is immediately answered: a bat simply flutters around carrying out its activities of life, experiencing nothing, just living. If a bat is aware of its existence, there are infinitely more questions to be raised to discover exactly what life as a bat is like. Many would argue that the key difference between the human consciousness and that of a bat is vision - I disagree. In order to see its world, a bat relies on sound and echoes to create the complex world that a human sees by vision; is that a key difference? The difference in the electromagnetic sound waves and light waves is little more than wavelength and frequency, therefore it is very reasonable to assume that a bat's vision is nearly as accurate as a human's, perhaps better if the bouncing waves are sent frequent enough to produce a constant image. Vision is not a key difference, but only an integral part of the sensory system that produces any creature's consciousness. For the most accurate depiction, one would need to know how a bat's senses of smell, taste, and touch compare to that of a human's, or more importantly, how a bat thinks. Humans have developed many complex languages over the course of many generations, a very largely important part of anyone's daily life. While I assume that most other creatures also have a "language," I also assume that very few, if any at all, of these languages are universal, due the human influence over the world. Everything is possessed or secluded, and therefore it is impossible for any creature to have a universally understood language. So while we are familiar with the idea of communication anywhere in the world, bats cannot communicate outside of their ecosystem. Not only is the task of accurately imagining "what it is like for a bat to be a bat" impossible, but it is likewise impossible to imagine the consciousness of any other animal in existence. The epistemologies of any animal may be studied, but no one can truly think as another animal does. Even the most similar of animals, the chimp, may never be completely understood. However, being as similar in nature to humans, if any progress is ever to be made on the study of various epistemologies, I imagine it would be best to start with the chimps, and if any progress is to be made, work from there. © III Enterprises & neotope.com |
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