alt.hn

6/10/2026 at 8:35:07 PM

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

 https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

by shadow28

6/11/2026 at 2:38:04 AM

> 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".

by randallsquared

6/11/2026 at 3:25:22 AM

I think he makes it pretty clear he's only talking about the second one of your two definitions

>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?

by why_at

6/11/2026 at 11:10:12 AM

> 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).

by simiones

6/11/2026 at 1:05:45 PM

I'm with Alan Watts. It's consciousness all the way down, in a unified, Spinozan, sense. A rock feels rock like you feel you, just in rock ways. Tat Tvam Asi, in a way.

It's useful for us to have the concept of separateness, like it's useful for us to have the concept of names, or a foot, or dollars, etc. But it doesn't mean things really are separate.

by bobson381

6/11/2026 at 3:35:08 PM

We don’t know, in the same way that we don’t know that there is no God… It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.

by solumunus

6/12/2026 at 7:47:15 AM

> It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.

I don't think this is a fair statement. I also happen to believe that there are no gods and that most animals have subjective experiences in some sense similar to our own (while I also believe that atoms and rocks don't), but I don't really think there is a meaningful probability you can associate with either position.

by simiones

6/12/2026 at 8:39:12 AM

That they don’t experience anything would be a more shocking revelation to almost everyone, I think.

by solumunus

6/11/2026 at 11:36:39 AM

If I was certain that bats had a subjective experience of the world, it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer. Since we don't understand how personal experience happens in humans, yet, I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.

by randallsquared

6/11/2026 at 4:42:52 PM

>it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer.

Okay, I think this is part of what I found confusing about your initial comment, since "person" is often used interchangeably with "human". But if you're using it to mean something that has a subjective experience then that's fine.

>I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.

This sounds like it would put you with the "extremists" then? It's widely agreed that all mammals if not all vertebrates have some subjective experience, consciousness, sentience, or whatever you want to call it.[1][2] As you've said though we can't be fully sure.

Do you think any non-humans have this?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

[2]https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou...

by why_at

6/11/2026 at 12:45:14 PM

I don't know what you mean to say by claiming the distinction. Can you prove to me that you have a richer first person perspective than a bat? Or if that's too hard can you convincingly demonstrate that the bat doesn't have a richer first person perspective than you? If no to both it's all needles empty speculation and self aggrandisement.

by aahs

6/11/2026 at 2:42:23 PM

I don't know with complete certainty that there IS a distinction, to be sure, since I don't know how consciousness/subjectivity/personhood works. Every previous grouping of entities we've accepted as people have said so themselves.

by randallsquared

6/11/2026 at 11:03:11 AM

> "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions"

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.

by kbrkbr

6/11/2026 at 11:28:46 AM

In the first phrase, thermostat can substitute for "brain". A thermostat has a sense of (or "method of collecting data about") something not in the thermostat, and can react to changes in data reported by that sense, and some can plan changes based on expected future reports. None of that requires a person interior to the thermostat receiving that data and processing it.

by randallsquared

6/11/2026 at 12:42:03 PM

I disagree. You can sense something using a thermostat. The thermostat is just a tool based on a functional relationship. "Sensing" has no literal, unequivocal use here.

by kbrkbr

6/11/2026 at 2:47:49 PM

You asked in what way I was using "sense" differently from "has a subjective experience of". My reply was that I was using it to effectively mean "collect data about". I don't have much interest in arguing that "sense" means one thing or the other, but I can reword my initial statement which you quoted as

> "brain can collect data about the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions"

without any harm to my intended meaning, and without requiring you to agree that "sense" doesn't necessarily include subjective experience.

by randallsquared

6/11/2026 at 6:54:43 AM

A bat might not have a "personal point of view" in the human sense, but that doesn't mean there is no point of view at all

by MarceliusK

6/11/2026 at 10:54:00 AM

The question is ultimately meaningless. All we have are actions and reactions, and brain scans. We can talk perfectly well based on that, although, it will be a bit cumbersome.

All the qualia, subjective stuff etc. is just shorthand, for whta ultimately boils down to actions in the world.

by abc123abc123

6/11/2026 at 11:15:23 AM

That already presupposes a very narrow idea of what's meaningful that is quite far away from everyday life, where we talk about and evaluate subjective experiences all the time.

How do we talk about ethics in terms of actions, reactions abd brain scans please? That looks like an uncovered check.

In what sense are they a shorthand for actions in the world?

by kbrkbr

6/12/2026 at 3:29:02 PM

Ethics is just code for expressing how we feel about things. There is no "ethic" in nature, just the words we say to express it. Every day life, and the way we talk about it, _is_ far away, many layers of abstractions, and that was precisely my point. Thank you for providing an example.

by abc123abc123

6/12/2026 at 9:47:05 PM

That's one opinion out of many. Some say so, some say so.

But you did not answer my question on how we talk about ethics in terms of actions and brain scans.

The devil is in the details, and when you try to express why it is bad to kill people over a small argument in terms of actions etc., then you might find that this is not as simple as you insinuated.

"There is no 'ethic' in nature" is also easy said in the armchair, but becomes a lifeless abstraction pretty fast when confronted with real human suffering and tears.

by kbrkbr

6/11/2026 at 10:26:04 AM

This raises an interesting question: is experience possible without a "point of view" as you call it; without any subject, only sensing and reacting? I don't think so. A purely reactive system cannot experience the world. Subjective experience requires an object to be experienced and a subject experiencing the object. In the case of the bat, the object(s) being experienced are all the signals coming from the sense organs of the bat plus the inner chatter of the bat's mind (if they have some). The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.

by pandoro

6/11/2026 at 11:42:05 AM

> The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.

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.

by randallsquared

6/10/2026 at 11:38:51 PM

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)

by dang

6/10/2026 at 9:09:44 PM

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.

by bobson381

6/11/2026 at 7:02:08 AM

Science is incredibly good at producing descriptions that are shareable between observers, but subjective experience is not obviously shareable in that same way

by MarceliusK

6/10/2026 at 10:18:33 PM

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.

by stared

6/10/2026 at 10:34:18 PM

Wanted to talk about it with Claude Fable 5... and it flagged the conversation (https://x.com/pmigdal/status/2064837039552409763).

Sure, cybersecurity and biology are dangerous topics. Turns out, so is philosophy of mind.

by stared

6/11/2026 at 12:01:07 AM

Bats

by JackFr

6/11/2026 at 2:05:20 AM

If you think you can outright reject one of the most famous arguments in philosophy of mind with a semantic quibble, you should think again.

by emp17344

6/11/2026 at 1:48:31 AM

I don't think you understood the paper, to be honest.

by throw4847285

6/11/2026 at 12:24:06 AM

I'd love to respond, but I am shadowbanned.

by rdevilla

6/11/2026 at 2:33:58 AM

Assuming you are planning to continue participating anyway, you should just respond. Presuming it's a good response, with a bit of luck someone will vouch for it and make it visible.

by nkurz

6/11/2026 at 2:46:38 AM

Try sending an email to their contact address (bottom of page). Unless there's a good reason your comments are being auto killed, they will fix it.

by hackinthebochs

6/11/2026 at 3:41:30 AM

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.

by dwd

6/11/2026 at 6:52:07 AM

The essay is not about whether a human could experience bat consciousness.

> "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.

by KingMob

6/11/2026 at 7:36:10 AM

This is like asking whats its like to turn fire into water. If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat". Now if you are able to freely transform into a bat and maintain consciousness back and forth, then you are now a consciousness that is able to experience both. Again not 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.

by anon-3988

6/11/2026 at 9:07:25 AM

> If you become a bat, you are a bat, you cannot get out of that space and think "oh so that is what it is like to be a bat".

This is what makes the question so difficult. The human would experience what is like for a bat to be a bat but in the context of human understanding and consciousness. It already makes too little sense so maybe an analogy to attaching a debugger is getting close? Or "running a bat" as a VM or inside a sandbox in the human mind hypervisor, one brain brain hemisphere is the bat (with virtual peripherals), the other observes and experiences everything as a human.

But in the end the goal would be to have the full bat experience on your own skin and perception, and then process it as a human to understand as a human would.

by close04

6/11/2026 at 9:49:50 AM

[dead]

by KingMob

6/11/2026 at 5:58:31 AM

But when you look at brain organoids they quickly find themselves able to play video games as complex as Doom.

by t-writescode

6/11/2026 at 3:55:04 AM

This seems like a clear false dichotomy.

by fellowniusmonk

6/11/2026 at 6:56:41 AM

The point isn't that a human could literally sample bat experience. It's that if bat experience exists, it is tied to a form of embodiment and perception that we can describe externally but not fully inhabit subjectively

by MarceliusK

6/10/2026 at 9:17:13 PM

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.

by indoordin0saur

6/10/2026 at 9:31:46 PM

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.

by pants2

6/11/2026 at 3:23:21 AM

Maybe they're just following the sound of the other bats directly, they way you would if you were blindfolded and told to walk with a group of people.

by lukas099

6/11/2026 at 11:09:45 PM

That's a good point

by pants2

6/10/2026 at 9:10:55 PM

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.

by justonceokay

6/11/2026 at 1:32:06 AM

I've read this paper several times, over the years, and I've never understood why its considered such a landmark. I think it could be losslessly compressed to one paragraph of modest length.

by PopePompus

6/11/2026 at 3:53:51 AM

Would you care to share that paragraph with the rest of the class in that case?

by Obscurity4340

6/11/2026 at 5:18:56 AM

Many people (e.g., Daniel Dennett, myself) think it's a terrible paper that has done a huge amount of damage. Unfortunately, that too makes it a landmark. Likewise for Searle's Chinese Room argument and Chalmers' "hard problem" as discussed in "The Conscious Mind" and elsewhere.

by jibal

6/10/2026 at 10:08:25 PM

Came here hoping for an AMA.

by allenrb

6/10/2026 at 11:20:39 PM

Close enough ... go ahead.

by imbateman

6/10/2026 at 10:56:17 PM

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.

by hackinthebochs

6/11/2026 at 2:42:13 AM

I agree that evolution could not produce a rational agent who would still reliably respond to lower level imperatives (such as pain, hunger, lust) without consciousness and feeling. The primitive parts of the brain have to be able to override the higher functions to ensure survival and reproduction. But an LLM isn't evolved in this way; its fitted to a functional output. It is entirely possible there will never be anyone home. I sure hope there isn't, because at the scale we're using them it would be a moral catastrophe.

by jeremyjh

6/11/2026 at 12:53:32 AM

> 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.

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.

by heyitsguay

6/11/2026 at 1:37:00 AM

> 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.

by hackinthebochs

6/11/2026 at 4:29:35 AM

Completely agree. This is what Hofstadter means by a strange loop. Our current LLMs have no attentional autonomy by design. The recursion is superficial and without its own Now. Adding attentional autonomy is The frightening alignment issue.

by robwwilliams

6/11/2026 at 5:12:46 AM

> 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.

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.

by whakim

6/11/2026 at 6:34:53 AM

Presumably the question you're asking is why does a unified self representation require consciousness. (Split brain cases are easy examples of how a break in unification results in incoherent behavior.) The brain nominally performs functions as cascading behavior of atoms whose structural relationships correspond to various functions. But there is no unification at the unconscious/atomistic level therefore a new representational regime is required that can ground the higher level unification.

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.

by hackinthebochs

6/11/2026 at 1:08:43 PM

> 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).

But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain. So qualia and consciousness seem like they have nothing to do with ensuring coherent behavior. To put this another way, your experiences and interactions with the world could be sufficient to associate the stove with danger, but how does that explain why the experience of touching the stove has qualia, as opposed to simply the pain-reaction of a patient without inner brain function or a baby?

Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation; most of the time, there is no conscious experience associated with it, but yet it is happening constantly and coherently.

Let's simplify it further: to use a famous example, do you believe that a thermostat is conscious? After all, a theremostat is able to coherently regulate its temperature over time in response to changes in its environment.

by whakim

6/11/2026 at 2:27:01 PM

>But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain.

Yes, reflexive avoidance behavior doesn't require conscious experience. But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.

>Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation

This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.

>do you believe that a thermostat is conscious?

No. No self model, no consciousness.

by hackinthebochs

6/11/2026 at 3:27:46 PM

> But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.

But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing actions against other interests require subjective experience? That sounds simply like a mathematical function (perhaps using our own past experiences as inputs). Reinforcement Learning is a great counterexample here: AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.

If thermoregulation is too "reflexive" for you, consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.

> This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.

This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".

by whakim

6/11/2026 at 4:32:38 PM

>But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing actions against other interests require subjective experience?

I have a few different answers here. None are rock solid. Lets take it as a given that planning requires a unified representation of all inputs to the planning apparatus. Now, going with the example from earlier: an organism touches a hot stove and recoils. We can imagine this behavior without any accompanying qualia. But to plan subsequent behavior around the hot stove, the damaging hotness must be represented in the unified representation in a way that intrinsically carries the semantics of negative valence. Phenomenal pain just is "semantics of negative valence featured in a unified representation". My claim is that this is a conceptual identity; you can't have one without the other. This gives the planning apparatus competence at engaging with signals of bodily damage.

Without intrinsic semantics/phenomenality all you have is a signal with no intrinsic meaning and some context to select behavior downstream of the signal. But planning in dynamic environments requires much more flexible signaling than this kind of static context can provide.

>AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.

AI systems are highly fragmented representations. It's why you can get them to contradict themselves in the same session, or even one sentence after another. They are not an exemplar of coherent behavior. There's also no negative valence in LLMs. At most they have a representation of good/bad and this spectrum influences the valence/quality/alignment in their behavior. But valence as such is external to the LLM.

>consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.

Complexity is relative. The complexity of tasks sans qualia are always starkly deficient compared to comparable tasks with qualia. A wide look at cognitive science demonstrates the inherent value of qualia to highly complex tasks or tasks executed over long timescales.

>This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts...

The goalposts aren't shifted, I'm clarifying the target of the term behavior as there was clearly a disagreement in meaning.

>to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".

This misunderstands the debate. The philosophical issue of consciousness is how to explain consciousness given the in principle completeness of physical descriptions and their categorical distinction from phenomenal descriptions. In this context, voluntary behavior is just higher order/complex behavior, it is not taken as downstream of consciousness in principle. There is a parallel conversation in psychology/cognitive science where consciousness is largely understood as wakefulness, attention, reportability, intentionality, etc. In this context "consciousness" (in this restricted sense) is a pre-requisite of voluntary behavior. But that's neither here nor there with regards to the philosophical debate.

by hackinthebochs

6/12/2026 at 4:41:38 AM

[dead]

by grantcas

6/11/2026 at 3:59:01 AM

I don't think that it is appropriate to use "gestalt" here. The word used in the field is "qualia", it has a precise meaning and is precisely what Nagel was writing about. Gestalt, to my understanding, is quite different, even when used in english psychology writing.

by PaulDavisThe1st

6/11/2026 at 5:21:39 AM

My usage of gestalt isn't without precedent[1]. I like gestalt better than qualia as a neutral description of the explanandum. Qualia is an atomistic view of consciousness and so is heavily theory-laden. I had just read a comment from the previous thread[2] on how this paper was translated into other languages and the lack of an equivalent "what its like" phrasing. The translations struck me as missing the virtue of the what it's like phrasing, namely identifying the intrinsic perspectivalness of cognitive systems without taking a stand on how to cash it out. I was trying to think of a better phrasing that could translate well and I landed on gestalt.

[1] https://philpapers.org/archive/EPSGPA.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45120638

by hackinthebochs

6/10/2026 at 11:17:19 PM

Could you determine if I am conscious using the same interface you have into an LLM?

by idiotsecant

6/10/2026 at 11:31:22 PM

Seems like a rather ad hoc restriction. The issue is one of inferring the structure of the processes generating the output. I suppose given enough time and an adversarial style of interaction one could in principle determine the computational structure of any system with high confidence. So probably yes, modulo real-world concerns.

by hackinthebochs

6/11/2026 at 8:39:35 AM

So I've always thought what if each of our individual consciousnesses is like a radio frequency that is unique to each individual? This would explain why we regain consciousness when we wake up, because our physiology is locked to whatever that frequency happens to be.

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!

by skc

6/11/2026 at 11:22:01 AM

This is pure pseudo-science at its finest. You're using sciencey words without putting any real meaning behind them. A frequency has to be a frequency of something (e.g. an electromagnetic wave). There would also have to be a mechanism that would explain why each body is tied to exactly one and only one "frequency" throughout its entire life, and why it never happens that different bodies share a consciousness; and there are thousand other things - but I'll stop here as I've already put more thought into this non-idea than it deserves.

by simiones

6/11/2026 at 5:29:45 AM

I feel like consciousness is an emergent phenomenon derived from several brain processes that constructively overlap. Many mammals have several necessary elements but lack the complete set of structures necessary to achieve what an average human would identify as "consciousness."

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.

by themafia

6/11/2026 at 9:21:08 AM

How would you know? What evidence can you put forth that say a dog or dormouse does not have a conscious experience, but your next door neighbour (presumably human) has?

by kreyenborgi

6/11/2026 at 5:47:39 PM

Behavioral observation.

by themafia

6/11/2026 at 1:38:37 PM

One of my favorite bits from this is actually a footnote:

"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."

by Hotdogsteve

6/11/2026 at 6:33:07 AM

The conclusion to me, is that we may be able to build systems that behave intelligently before we understand whether intelligence and consciousness are connected at all.

by lwhi

6/11/2026 at 3:43:24 AM

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.

by visarga

6/11/2026 at 4:04:55 AM

You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.

by robwwilliams

6/11/2026 at 5:03:55 AM

Isn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient to explain consciousness - qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.

by whakim

6/11/2026 at 8:20:57 AM

> qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.

While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism experiences qualia, and any historical/evolutionary evidence is also lost.

by simiones

6/11/2026 at 3:13:15 PM

The relation is not qualia at the base and language on top, even if qualia is more primitive, because language directs action and action leads back to qualia, so they form a recursive loop which cannot be analyzed component by component anymore.

Qualia represents the compressed past experiences acting as a screen on which we represent new experiences, language is compressed past experiences from others and from past generations. Both work to reduce costs of cognition and action. (imho)

by visarga

6/11/2026 at 12:55:36 PM

Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.

by whakim

6/12/2026 at 8:14:16 AM

Most proponents of the existence of qualia regard them as fundamental to what they call the hard problem of consciousness. People like Chalmers and Searle assume that all of the externally observable behaviors of people could be (at least in principle) explained without the need for qualia; that is, they believe it's possible for p-zombies to exist; this then gives rise to this question of consciousness - if all physical behaviors can be explained without qualia, and yet everyone of us has qualia, how and why does this happen?

I thought the point above was in a similar vein - that qualia and language are theoretically separable phenomena, so that we can imagine a being might have qualia without language, or language without qualia, and so these need to be explained separately. I was trying to point out that we have no proof for the existence of beings that possess these two qualities separately, so that I don't think the theoretical distinction is necessarily true. Just like any volume of gas has a temperature and a pressure, the existence of separate concepts doesn't mean they are physically separable.

by simiones

6/11/2026 at 4:18:52 AM

Oh, I’d say they had some good clues.

by EGreg

6/11/2026 at 7:13:23 AM

Describing that loop from outside is not the same as paying the cost of running it from inside

by MarceliusK

6/11/2026 at 7:06:19 AM

You've completely left out the Hard Problem, though, and missed the essay's point.

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.

by KingMob

6/11/2026 at 1:22:35 PM

No - he's right - it's all relative. Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color.

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.

by HarHarVeryFunny

6/12/2026 at 8:00:15 AM

> Our experience of a color is based on recall of things of that color.

You're getting memory mixed up with current experience. I think you mean to say that experience is based on the neural substrate associated with a color (mostly area V4 in human brains, which causes achromatopsia when damaged bilaterally).

(If memory is mandatory, then infants wouldn't see color when they first open their eyes, which seems unlikely. It also implies that cerebral achromatopsia would be impossible; but the damage that causes achromatopsia is in primary visual cortex, not memory areas.)

---

But again, this misses the point. The RGB triplet is a fact known about the color, but knowing 100% of the facts of the representation does NOT tell you what it is like to experience red.

Consider a perfect future neuroscience lab that uses nanomachines to safely record every neuronal firing, every dendritic voltage shift, every synaptic cleft's neurotransmitter levels, all at microsecond precision, while showing you red circles. This lab knows everything about what your brain does in response to red stimuli. Everything EXCEPT the subjective experience of redness in the participants.

by KingMob

6/12/2026 at 12:28:36 PM

An infant's perception of the world, in the days/weeks/months following birth is not going to be like our own until they have indeed started to form memories/associations of things outside of the womb (where the main color they will be exposed to is red - light filtered through the mother's stomach). Even after birth it's going to be a while (depending on parents/environment) until they have much exposure to certain classes of things, maybe even certain colors (e.g. an indoor baby may not be seeing a lot of green).

RGB triplet has little to do with color vision since we don't have sensors for individual wavelengths - our color cones (most people have 3 types, but some have 4, allowing them to distinguish a lot of spectra that a normal person can't) all have broad gaussian responses and so all respond to all wavelengths, just with different spectral sensitivities.

An infant who first opens their eyes, or is exposed to new colors for the first time, is not going to have the same experience of color as later on, but necessarily there will still be some experience of "color" (e.g. a varying surface attribute, differing by the different neural inputs coming from the retina), but the subconscious associations will of course be different - something is not going to be perceived as "grass green" or "sky blue" until you have experienced those.

Of course you can never know the subjective experience of another person, let alone another animal, since while there will be a lot in common, dictated by brain architecture, it's also going to depend on individual experience. Our senses work by prediction, which is based on personal experience. If you look at a mid-game chess board you are not going to see the same thing as a grandmaster since they will be seeing positions and you will just be seeing pieces.

The real point is that the subjective experience of a color like red is not some absolute thing tied to the neural inputs for "red" (i.e. varying strengths of signal firing from your 3/4 wavelength sensors), since the experience is the same even when those inputs change - color constancy, goggle experiment, etc etc.

by HarHarVeryFunny

6/13/2026 at 10:29:11 AM

You are still missing the point, and talking about everything BUT the disconnect between objectivity and subjectivity. I don't know how many times I have to mention the Hard Problem in the comments before people address it in their responses.

Yes, subjective experience is unique, based in neural architecture, color-blindness, experience, etc, etc etc. All of that is irrelevant to the essay.

> The real point is that the subjective experience of a color like red is not some absolute thing tied to the neural inputs for "red", since the experience is the same even when those inputs change

Not the real point of the essay at all. Please, just go read up on the Hard Problem.

by KingMob

6/13/2026 at 12:24:52 PM

That's not really what Nagel is talking about - the paper is about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of using reductionism to explain some things such as subjective (conscious) experience.

Note that at the beginning of the paper Nagel says "Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life ...". His starting point is a willingness to accept that higher order animals are indeed conscious, and that by extension it is indeed like something to be them.

If you want to discuss the hard problem, then you are talking about the wrong paper, and should be reading Chalmers (or Kirk's earlier "Zombies v. Materialists") not Nagel. However, Nagel is of course right, and the p-zombie is a non-sensical construct. If you have a sufficiently advanced cognitive apparatus then of course you can reflect on your own mental life - of course it "feels like something".

by HarHarVeryFunny

6/10/2026 at 10:54:02 PM

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-...

by freejoe76

6/10/2026 at 11:13:38 PM

An Octopus may seem more like an alien with its 9 brains (one central, plus one per tentacle), but note that the left/right hemispheres of other animal's brains are essentially separate brains, and human's who have had "split brain" surgery to separate these (e.g. in cases of severe epilepsy) don't report feeling much, if at all, different afterwards than they did before.

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!

by HarHarVeryFunny

6/11/2026 at 9:02:14 AM

It's very likely related to this beautiful article by Katherine Hayles

https://modesofcognition.antikythera.org/

by Linello

6/11/2026 at 9:11:05 AM

Is there a plain pdf? That page was extremely hard to read and Reader mode doesn't seem to handle it in Firefox

by kreyenborgi

6/11/2026 at 9:16:07 AM

Absolutely savage document reading experience.

by phrotoma

6/11/2026 at 9:12:11 AM

Of all the papers I've read over the years, this was one that not only became immediately memorable, but I have brought up numerous times in conversation.

by throstur

6/11/2026 at 6:51:39 AM

Soo an outside description of a system, no matter how complete, does not obviously give us the inside of the experience...

by MarceliusK

6/10/2026 at 9:19:45 PM

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.

by jmdeon

6/10/2026 at 10:31:47 PM

I've definitely had some spooky feeling conversations, including one where it said

> 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

by kybernetikos

6/10/2026 at 9:34:21 PM

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)

by pants2

6/10/2026 at 10:19:24 PM

That's pretty funny. I wonder how it came to that conclusion? Seems like a stretch that someone would have discussed that technique on a reddit thread it was trained on, but definitely not impossible.

by jmdeon

6/10/2026 at 10:30:49 PM

They explicitly train the models to say that they aren't sentient, so it makes sense it would say such a thing.

by suddenlybananas

6/10/2026 at 10:02:26 PM

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?

by lisper

6/11/2026 at 5:22:58 AM

Those are all states that humans can be in and repeatedly have been in. Being a bat is not such a state.

by jibal

6/10/2026 at 10:10:56 PM

Today a Hacker News user discovers the concept of qualia.

by LiquidSky

6/10/2026 at 10:13:56 PM

What is it like to only comment about the headline?

by bezier-curve

6/10/2026 at 11:37:50 PM

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by mrandish

6/10/2026 at 11:48:37 PM

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by speak_plainly

6/10/2026 at 10:26:31 PM

[flagged]

by werfghbl

6/10/2026 at 9:10:00 PM

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?

by kelseyfrog

6/10/2026 at 9:40:39 PM

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.

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.

by jubilanti

6/10/2026 at 9:11:04 PM

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.

by bobson381

6/10/2026 at 9:21:46 PM

I dont think you can know that unless you know what it's like to be me.

by kelseyfrog

6/10/2026 at 9:29:38 PM

in that case, hello, bat!

by bobson381

6/10/2026 at 9:47:33 PM

Hi, finally someone believes me! :)

by kelseyfrog

6/10/2026 at 9:14:53 PM

You only pretend to know, that's not true knowledge.

by satvikpendem

6/10/2026 at 9:17:05 PM

How do you know that? Do you know what it's like to be me?

by kelseyfrog

6/10/2026 at 9:52:12 PM

You're close, really close! None of us know what it is like to be anyone else, that's the point. We think we can imagine we know, but we truly do not.

by jubilanti

6/10/2026 at 9:24:40 PM

They can make the claim to know what it is like to be you as much as you can make the claim that you know what it is like to be a bat.

by fredoliveira

6/10/2026 at 9:28:40 PM

I will know the difference. That's enough for me.

by kelseyfrog

6/10/2026 at 10:35:43 PM

How will you know the difference unless you are a bat? You cannot.

by satvikpendem

6/11/2026 at 12:17:25 AM

I can. You don't have access to my subjective experience to be able to claim I don't.

by kelseyfrog

6/11/2026 at 4:29:31 AM

You can't because you cannot become a bat, so thinking you can is just that, thought. I don't need your subjective experience to know.

by satvikpendem

6/11/2026 at 8:14:24 PM

Are you claiming you know what it is like to be me? You can't know about the bat thing unless you know what it is like to be me.

by kelseyfrog

6/11/2026 at 10:12:05 PM

I know you're a human, therefore I know you cannot know what it's like to be a bat, as an objective fact, regardless of how you think you think subjectively.

by satvikpendem

6/11/2026 at 10:15:02 PM

I am a human who objectively knows what it's like to be a bat.

I have greater epistemic authority over what I know than others.

by kelseyfrog

6/12/2026 at 1:04:13 AM

> who objectively knows what it's like to be a bat.

Sigh. Thinking you know and knowing is not the same, especially thinking you "objectively" know something. Maybe you should read the article posted instead of commenting these sorts of sentences.

by satvikpendem

6/12/2026 at 5:30:50 PM

I've read it many times over the years. I objectively know what it is like to be a bat and you cannot claim I don't without claiming you objectively know what it is like to be me.

If this frustrates you, then congratulations; we have a starting point for discussion. Be open to describing where that frustration originates.

by kelseyfrog

6/11/2026 at 5:26:09 AM

Do Bats reminisce about the past? How far ahead do Bats plan their next action? Can a Bat be jealous?

by themafia

6/12/2026 at 5:32:28 PM

Great questions, unfortunately being like a bat is a qualia and just as I cannot describe the qualia of redness, I can only describe the qualia of batness as a thing in itself.

by kelseyfrog

6/10/2026 at 9:11:35 PM

How do you justify that your intuition about what echolocation is like tracks with what a bat actually feels?

by justonceokay

6/10/2026 at 9:35:43 PM

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"?

by danlitt

6/10/2026 at 11:01:32 PM

I don’t know those things about myself so they can’t be necessary.

by robotresearcher

6/10/2026 at 10:55:04 PM

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.

by HarHarVeryFunny

6/11/2026 at 12:05:29 AM

This misses the point of the discussion. Yes, we can understand what it is like to be a human with echolocation. However, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat.

by hatthew

6/11/2026 at 2:39:36 AM

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by HarHarVeryFunny

6/11/2026 at 12:14:37 AM

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by mdgld