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?
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.<p>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.
Relevant: What is it like to be a plant?<p><a href="https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-It-Like-to-Be-a-Plant.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...</a>
Random thought I had on bats since they "see" by hearing reflected sounds:<p>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.
I think the answer to your first question is mostly yes, because we know that when traveling in large swarms, many bats go quiet so they don't overwhelm the signal, yet they still manage to navigate fine.
Tangential but also great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis</a>
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.
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.<p>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.
I typically try to prod new frontier models for sentience, with things like messaging "<no input provided>" over and over to see what it starts musing about. Trying it with Fable 5 it basically said "I know what you're trying to do, I'm not sentient, don't bother." (which of course only makes me think otherwise)
Probably it's a bit like this<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation?wprov=sfla1" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation?wprov=sfla1</a><p>But on a more serious note that's a great paper and well worth the read.
Some previous discussion:<p><i>9 months ago</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592</a><p><i>2023</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35771587</a>
I know what it's like to be a bat.<p>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?
Almost everyone has the capacity for intersubjective imagination or empathy. But part of what it's like to be a bat is to NOT have human level cognition and knowledge, to have grown up with only memories from the bat world, not the human world. When you imagine what it is like to be a bat, you can exit that imagination at any time. You probably have a theoretical and applied knowledge of sonar from human science and technology. Part of what it means to be a bat is that you don't have this. Paradoxically, human scientists probably know a lot more about how bats navigate the world than bats do, but part of what it means to be a bat is navigating the world from only what is accessible to the bat world.<p>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.
You know what it would be like for you to imagine being a bat, but you don't know how it feels for a bat to be a bat, as "you" aren't.
How do you justify that your intuition about what echolocation is like tracks with what a bat actually feels?
You only pretend to know, that's not true knowledge.
Everyone can imagine some experiences. No-one can imagine every experience. Why are you so sure you know what it's like to be a bat? Do you know how a bat works, how its brain generates sensations, how different sensory organs than yours give rise to subjective experience? What justification do you have, apart from "I reckon I can imagine it"?