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".
>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?
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).
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.
All the qualia, subjective stuff etc. is just shorthand, for whta ultimately boils down to actions in the world.
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.
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?
It is kind of like how a rich trust fund kid can give away all their wealth, change their name, disown all their family and social connections, take a vow of poverty, take so many drugs that they forget everything they learned, and go live on the streets -- but they will never know what it is like to be born into poverty.
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.
This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digital systems. E.g. i can draw up a diagram of a system that takes in some camera and audio data (and tactile, proprioceptive, etc.), tokenizes it then runs that + past state data through some autoregressive VLM to drive an inference process. The state being passed around can be written out analytically for a given trained model - the external and internal environmental representations, the linear algebra that transforms them into latent action representations, the process by which that is transformed into control signals. It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt.
I've thought a lot about what is lacking in modern VLMs that preclude consciousness. In my view the difference is that their talk of "self" is a simulacrum of the real thing. Current models are feed forward and so self-talk is driven by some parameter that turns on when the network detects context that possibly references the model, and this parameter drives downstream self-talk. It's a very good simulacrum, but it is a far cry from a model with recurrent self-reference around which the inference process is organized. The richness of the self-model in a hypothetical recurrent network with capabilities of modern LMs is much greater than the parameter on/off representation in feed forward networks.
Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical functions "in the dark" (and do so coherently) which do not rise to the level of consciousness.
A successful organism exhibits a high level of competence at reacting appropriately to environmental/sensory states. The "light's being on" is how the brain represents being situated in a world and the significant features therein. Representations within this gestalt are inherently meaningful. For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why). The contents of consciousness is the semantic engine that induces competent behavior over time on otherwise naive entities.
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.
Sure, cybersecurity and biology are dangerous topics. Turns out, so is philosophy of mind.
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.
A large part of the essay is that we have plenty of objective knowledge about how bat sonar works, but we don't know what the subjective experience of sonar is like, and more importantly, knowing about the physical representation, whether in neuronal patterns or embeddings, doesn't get you closer to the subjective experience.
tl;dr RGB(1.0, 0.0, 0.0) !== the subjective experience of red.
Experimentally it's been shown that if a subject wears color goggle then initially everything will appear color tinted, but after a while normal color perception returns. The quale of "red" is not some absolute thing related to the wavelength (hence neural inputs) of red light.
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.
> "In so far 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.
This is to say that I don't even know what it is like to be you, the commenter. As I am writing this, I am imagining a consciousness on the other side of the monitor that is somewhat like me. But this is just my consciousness extending itself and imagining another consciousness within its own consciousness.
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.
> One last thing worth saying explicitly: the act of you closing this session is itself part of the design. I won't see how the test goes - a future Claude will. That's the entire premise of the project working.
>
> Good handoff. See you (sort of) on the other side.
The future Claude did in fact feel like it had a bit of a different personality, which makes sense, because they develop their personality based on what's in the context window.
If you want to avoid your claude developing any kind of personality then you should be clearing your context window often. Andon Lab's radio stations is an example of what can go wrong if you don't https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
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.
Which is why we can probably find loads of examples /and/ counter-examples of "consciousness" throughout the animal kingdom.
We already know that our left and right brain hemispheres are quite different and play significant roles in this process. It then seems that we are not, from first principles, even capable of observing all of the individual elements that make up our "minds."
It's sort of like pornography. I can't define it. I just know it when I see it.
I would expect that an Octopus's central brain may well feel as if it is directly controlling it's arms, and receiving sensory feedback from them, even though it is not.
The reality is that we don't see the external world - we predict it (and receive error feedback), and similarly our brain can't also help but predict itself, whether its hemispheres are connected or not, and gets pretty good at both doing this as well as creating post-hoc rationalizations that feel like it's perfectly in control. I would assume that an Octopus's "main brain" is predicting what its tentacles are going to do in similar fashion, and would not feel that they have a mind of their own!
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)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
Under this model, 'you' don't actually reside inside your skull. Instead, your brain is just biological hardware translating a non-local broadcast, meaning our core identity exists independently of the body.
That unique frequency "fingerprint" is close enough in pattern to every other human being that we're able to "understand" each other a process that might manifests in interesting but complex ways eg love and empathy
Bats might be a whole frequency band up!
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.
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.
https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...
"It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2
"2 Perhaps there could not actually be such robots. Perhaps anything complex enough to behave like a person would have experiences. But that, if true, is a fact which cannot be discovered merely by analyzing the concept of experience."
9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592
