Comment by enkid
3 years ago
I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse to not be able to say the human experience is fundamentally different than a bat's experience, even if it's difficult to articulate a bat's unique experience in a human language.
Edit: let me expound on that, as I'm not just being difficult. What does this questioning actually get you? The question of how a bat experiences the world vice a human gives me a meaningful thought experiment about what is consciousness and what the limits of our perceptions are. Asking whether or not the words are meaningful gives me nothing because the meaning of the article is so intuitively clear. In other words, questioning whether the words have meaning leads to a less meaningful experience vice using my intuition to understand the meaning to my interpretation.
For me, the point is not to avoid having to admit some kind of difference between human and bat experience (clearly they are different!). But I feel like the fact that this question ("what is it like to be a bat?") is hard (or even impossible) to answer is used in support of the thesis that there is something non-physical about human experience. By analyzing what this question really means in a technical and rigorous sense (and if it's even a coherent question at all), I only want to push back against it insofar as it is used to support that conclusion.
It actually supports the opposite conclusion for me, the fact that physical differences causes experiential differences suggests experience, and therefore consciousness has a physical basis.