Somebody used this paper to make the term batfished, which they defined as being fooled into ascribing subjectivity to a non-sentient actor (i.e. an AI).
Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" assumes that bats are conscious, and that the question of what is the subjective experience of being a bat (e.g. what does the sense of echolocation feel like) is therefore a meaningful question to ask.
The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
nsriv · 2h ago
I love this, hope it takes off like "enhsittification" or "slop" have already.
ants_everywhere · 1h ago
I'll add it to my anti-AI bingo card
IshKebab · 1h ago
Uhgh "slop" is ok but "enshittification" was lame from the start.
parpfish · 18m ago
Not only is it a terrible term, but it describes a concept that isn’t really worthy of having its own term. It’s really just a way of saying “people will make things worse over time”
guerrilla · 8m ago
That isn't what it means though. It means specifically that companies will make products and services worse over time for profit.
dmurray · 8m ago
No! Enshittification has a precise meaning, about how people will make things worse over time after making them good.
Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.
That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
adityaathalye · 5h ago
“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human.
The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.
jm__87 · 4h ago
None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person, we only know what it is like to be ourselves. It is kind of amazing when you think about it.
Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
cl3misch · 1h ago
That's almost exactly the beginning of Logic's story album "Everybody" which I have listened to so often that I can almost recite it. Despite years on HN I have never seen The Egg though. That blew my mind a bit, thanks!
AIorNot · 20m ago
You guys are aware of Advaita and neo Advaita right? It basically has been the perrinal philosophy underlying all subjective spiritual experiences from Sufism to Gnostics to Buddhism and the Tao
Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true
> None of us have even experienced the full range of what humans can experience, so even we don't fully know what it is like to be any given person
I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?
jm__87 · 2h ago
Another thing I think about a lot is that our own brains and sensory organs change (degrade) over time, so my own subjective experience is probably different in some important ways than it was like 20 years ago. My memory likely isn't good enough to fully capture the differences, so I don't even fully know what it was like to be me in the past.
binary132 · 1h ago
In a sense, I think it’s accurate to say we only really know what it’s like to be us right now. Everything we perceive about ourselves through the lens of memory is an echo if not in fact imaginary.
thunky · 1h ago
> would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc
Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.
Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.
edbaskerville · 1h ago
Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.
I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.
> Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision
Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.
In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
btown · 1h ago
My favorite (and admittedly unorthodox) companion piece to Nagel's Bat, and one of my favorite literary recommendations, is Vernor Vinge's Hugo-winning 2000 novel, A Deepness in the Sky [0].
It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking.
At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture?
What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind?
Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.
While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply.
>"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism."
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
Al-Khwarizmi · 2h ago
I believe you're falling into a purely linguistic trap. In other languages we wouldn't even use the word "like" in this kind of constructions, that's an English thing because other wordings sound awkward, but I don't think it entails comparison.
In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?"
In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?"
In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?"
None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so.
Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
glenstein · 1h ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I want to credit the GP one way, which is that the category they're identifying is real, namely of frivolous or circular comparisons. This just isn't one of those. It's a turn of phrase that's emphatic about the felt quality of qualitative experience. And in I think it's quite a good one, because in English it has just the right amount of cross-sections of connotation that it brings out this being felt quality that everyone reading it seems to understand. The idea has been around but this expression of it has gained the most traction in English.
As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.
mtlmtlmtlmtl · 3h ago
This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails. There's no meaningful insight below it all. All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc. And when you try to understand the arguments with the definition of these terms left open, you realise the arguments only make sense when the terms include in their definition a supposition that the argument is true. It's all just circular reasoning.
mellosouls · 3h ago
All of their arguments, however complex, all rely on poorly defined terms like "understand" "subjective experience", "what it is like", "qualia", etc.
Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness.
The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms.
To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is.
Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.
cwmoore · 1h ago
“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio D’Amasio, a book by a neuroscientist some years ago [0], does an excellent job of building a framework for conscious sensation from the parts, as I recall, constructing a theory of “mind maps” from various nervous system structures that impressed me with a sense that I could afterwards understand them.
As a radical materialist, the problem with ordinary materialism is that it boils down to dualism because some types matter (e.g. the human nervous system) give rise to consciousness and other types of matter (e.g. human bones) do not.
Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
cwmoore · 7m ago
Human bones most definitely do contribute to feeling, if not to LLMs. The book expands upon the idea of mind body duality to merge proprioception and general perception. I’d bet bats would enjoy marrow too if they could.
AIorNot · 17m ago
So how does a radical materialist explain consciousness- that it is too is a fundamental material phenomena? If so are you stretching the definition of materialism?
I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood
glenstein · 52m ago
I don't agree that the inherent nebulousness of the subject extends cover to the likes of Goff, Chalmers (on pansychism), or Searle and Nagel (on the hard problem). It's a both can be true situation and many practicing philosophers appreciate the nebulousness of the topic while strongly disagreeing with the collective attitudes embodied by those names.
mannykannot · 48m ago
Up to a point I agree, but when someone deploys this vague language in what are presented as strong arguments for big claims, it is they who bear the burden of disambiguating, clarifying and justifying the terms they use.
glenstein · 54m ago
>This is the conclusion I come to whenever I try to grasp the works of Nagel, Chalmers, Goff, Searle et al. They're just linguistically chasing their own tails.
I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.
But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.
biophysboy · 2h ago
If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false. The point is that objective measures, like writing, are external, and cannot describe internal subjective experience. Its one thing to probe the atoms; its another thing to be the atoms themselves.
Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that its impossible to know.
glenstein · 50m ago
>If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false.
Indeed! Makes you think: maybe it's a bug rather than a feature.
cwmoore · 1h ago
Tautologically, its “batty”.
plastic-enjoyer · 2h ago
Tech people not understanding philosophy, what a surprise.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
It’s fun to imagine what it would be like to understand consciousness.
brudgers · 1h ago
The “something” here refers to inner experience (something similar to Kantian “aperception”.
The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.
To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…
…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.
Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.
HarHarVeryFunny · 31m ago
Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" is about the sensory qualia of a bat, assuming it has consciousness and ability to experience quales, which he assumes it does.
The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.
trescenzi · 4h ago
There is no fundamental error it’s purposefully exactly as you state. Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
>Nagel is saying that consciousness is that second thing.
That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
trescenzi · 3h ago
So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
tech_ken · 3h ago
The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed".
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states
Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"
edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)
> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have
experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious
experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something
which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the
subject himself'.
brudgers · 43m ago
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
How do you know that?
Philosophically, of course.
I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.
Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s.
Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
tech_ken · 11m ago
> How do you know that?
Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like:
(1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing)
(2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1)
(3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition)
=> Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3)
> Just that all models, however useful are still models
Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.
biophysboy · 2h ago
I think that's why he states it as a biconditional, which makes the exclusive restriction you're arguing is necessary
antonvs · 3h ago
Do you believe that each run of a ChatGPT prompt has a conscious experience of its existence, much like you (presumably) do?
If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.
That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
Wait a minute - it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.
(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
Describing something as illusionary adds nothing because it implies someone to experience the illusion.
antonvs · 3h ago
> it's still possible to believe chatgpt is unconscious for the same reason a game of tetris is unconscious.
Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.
In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.
How would you describe the distinction?
> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"
Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
bondarchuk · 2h ago
There is no distinction: the idea that there is a distinction rests on a linguistic confusion. The sentence "something it is like to be a bat" tries, as it were, to split the concept of "being a bat" in two, then makes us wonder about the difference between the two halves. I reject that we have to answer for any such difference, when we can show that the two halves are actually the same thing. It's a grammatical trick caused by collapsing a word that usually relates two distinct things ("A is like B") onto a singular "something".
genericspammer · 2h ago
There’s no trick to it, you’re overanalyzing. It’s just saing if I were a stone -> no experience, a bat -> some kind of experience. It is not claiming to define the ”something” as you seem to think.
axus · 2h ago
A running game of Tetris has memory, responds to stimuli, and communicates. There has been evolution and reproduction of games of Tetris (perhaps in the way that viruses do). It isn't able to have feelings, what needs to be added for it to start having feelings and experiences?
genericspammer · 2h ago
I would say a lot would need to be added. Given the same input, the tetris game will respond exactly the same each time. There is no awareness, learning, no decisions made, but purely a 100% predictible process.
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
That’s the hard problem.
o_nate · 3h ago
The problem itself is at least centuries old, if not millennia. In his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689), John Locke phrased the same problem clearly, using different words:
"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
daoboy · 55m ago
Ed Yong wrote an excellent book closely related to this topic titled An Immense World on the sensory lives of animals that we are still only beginning to understand.
"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
tim333 · 1h ago
Maybe in the future we'll be able to run computer simulations of people and bats that think they are conscious and you'll be able to merge them a bit to get some bat experience?
AIorNot · 28m ago
You would be adding bat experience (sonar, hanging upside down, flying etc) to become a literal Bat Man so to speak :)
But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture
samirillian · 3h ago
Ive wondered if to a bat a bat is more like a whale, swimming through the air, calling out at a rate and pitch sort of matching the distance its electrical signals travel. To them they aren’t moving fast at all, or maybe to them maybe humans are like ents, plodding along so slow talking like ents.
I'm less convinced with consciousness as some sort of exceptional phenomenon—and how it's been used to define the "hard problem"—but the paper is still valuable as it provides an accessible entry point into the many problems of reductionism.
ebb_earl_co · 5h ago
What brought down your level on convinced?
vehemenz · 3h ago
When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness. Of course, some things can still be reduced and others can't, but in no situation is a phenomenon reduced in its metaphysical status. So what's the "problem" again, exactly? Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts—it's not a special metaphysical thing but merely a theoretical term like anything else.
glenstein · 46m ago
>When you reject the idea of reductionism, which Nagel's paper provokes us to do, then the entire idea of emergent phenomena collapses. Everything is on the same level, from fundamental particles to consciousness
Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism.
>Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts
If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.
dimal · 1h ago
I don’t read Nagel as rejecting the idea of reductionism as strongly as you suggest. He’s simply calling out its limitations with regard to subjective experience. Why does it imply that “everything is on the same level”?
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
This definition is a special metaphysical thing.
RS-232 · 3h ago
Both consciousness and experience arise from physical means. However, they are very distinct concepts and not mutually exclusive, which can lead to confusion when they are conflated.
Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable.
So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
glenstein · 41m ago
>Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience.
I was quite liking this explanation but you lost me here. I very strongly agree with your opening, and I think it's the key to everything. I think everyone insisting on a categorical divide runs into impossible problems.
And a good explanation of consciousness has to take the hard problem seriously, but doesn't have to agree that subjective and objective, or first person in third person or whatever you want to call them, are irreducibly distinct categories. But I think it makes more sense to say that some subset of all of the objective stuff out there is simultaneously subjective, rather than saying that all stuff at all times is both objective and subjective. I don't think an apple experiences gravity the way a mind experiences a conscious state, but I do think the through line of understanding them both as importantly physical in the same sense is key to tying physical reality to explanation of conscious states.
curiousguy7374 · 3h ago
But I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat
Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
mensetmanusman · 2h ago
There is a soul if you believe we aren’t all p-zombies. (Soul is the all encompassing word to distinguish this. Maybe there are better words?)
the_af · 3h ago
> Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?
How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
socrateswasone · 40m ago
It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.
AIorNot · 30m ago
Do you mean the bat has no subjective experience? If so - That’s a pretty extraordinary claim to make there and one that risks great ethical concern on the treatment or animals
If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so
IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity
Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
bee_rider · 4h ago
Can a bat answer the question of “what is it like to be a bat?” I mean, I guess they would have to be able to comprehend the idea of being, and then the idea that things might experience things in ways other than how they do. Bats don’t seem like very abstract thinkers.
I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
AIorNot · 25m ago
That’s called meta cognition (what humans do) not subjective experience - which is the feeling of what happens and sets animal or agentic creatures apart from rocks (not sure about plants)
snowram · 4h ago
Wittgenstein famously said "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him". This subject is a philosophical fun rabbit hole to explore.
glenstein · 35m ago
It's a great pull, because it has an important implication that I think ties in directly to Nagels point. Another fascinating variation of the same idea is "beetle in the box", another great one from Wittgenstein. I don't think I agree with him, because I think it hinges on assuming lions have fundamental and irreducibly different experiences. But I think we have important similarities due to our shared evolutionary heritage, and even from the outside I'm willing to die on the hill of insisting that Lions certainly do have experiences familiar to us, like hunger, pain, the satisfaction of having an itch scratched, having a visual field, and having the ability to distinguish shades and color (though their experience of color is likely importantly different from ours, but overlaps enough for there to be such a thing as shared meaning).
I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.
card_zero · 4h ago
> I think, on the contrary, that if a lion could talk, that lion would have a mind so different from the general run of lion minds, that although we could understand him just fine, we would learn little about ordinary lions from him.
(More Daniel Dennett)
PreHistoricPunk · 1h ago
That makes any kind of insight into consciousness as a general term impossible though. That would mean we could not learn anything about human consciousness as such from studying specific persons.
Dumblydorr · 3h ago
The very capability and flexibility of language drove evolution of the mind beyond what species with less linguistic behaviors could handle. After all, facility with language is a massive survival benefit, in our species more than any other. It’s circular because feedback loops in evolution are circular too.
card_zero · 4h ago
Dennett has a character telling a story about a bat:
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
antonvs · 3h ago
What is that criticism supposed to be criticizing?
Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
glenstein · 31m ago
It gives obvious examples of the way our awareness of factual circumstances give us inroads into what might be experienced. And the upshot is that this might suggest the rest of consciousness can be understood by iterating forward in a similar manner. Dennett makes this exact same point about Mary's Room. Far from talking past the article, it's attacking the fundamental principle.
card_zero · 3h ago
The pessimism, the "facts beyond the reach of human concepts".
nomilk · 1h ago
> Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
Struggling to make sense of this sentence.
AlexResi · 1h ago
An organism is conscious exactly when there is something it is like for that organism to be itself.
Or in a simpler way, consciousness is present just in case being that organism has an inner, subjective character - something that can not be reduced to a purely material state.
PreHistoricPunk · 1h ago
It means that if something has conscious mental states then it must have subjective experience from its own perspective. If John has a conscious mental state, then I must be able to ask "What is it like to be John?". Hope that helps.
padjo · 1h ago
I wouldn’t bother.
scubakid · 5h ago
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.
kelseyfrog · 4h ago
Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
ants_everywhere · 1h ago
> Pretty much the same conclusion here. Consciousness is what we feel when sheaf 1-cohomology among our different senses vanishes.
There's something more to it than this.
For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.
For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
kelseyfrog · 1h ago
I'll have to reflect more on the first part, but as far as
> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:
1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.
2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.
3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.
At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
ants_everywhere · 50m ago
Yeah to be clear I like this mental model a lot, and I give it extra points for invoking sheaf theory :). I was just saying it doesn't seem complete to me from a psychological perspective.
The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.
Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.
rout39574 · 4h ago
Do you really mean that it's very nearly the same thing "To be a" you, and an Elon Musk, a homo sapiens infant, and an Orangutan? And only modestly different from these to be a dog or a horse?
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
scubakid · 3h ago
good point, I'd agree sensors are just a piece of the picture
MollyRealized · 1h ago
Answer: You are a creature of the night, terrible, able to strike terror into a superstitious, cowardly lot.
iLemming · 4h ago
The article basically talkes about "umwelt" (there is a link at the bottom) - "is the specific way in which organisms of a particular species perceive and experience the world, shaped by the capabilities of their sensory organs and perceptual systems"
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
iLemming · 3h ago
I suppose someone (even an experienced vimmer) might argue that learning vim is not so much "umwelt-transformative", but rather like "muscle memory training", like LeetCode drilling.
Indeed, basic vim-navigation - (hjkl, w, b) is muscle memory.
But, I'd argue the umwelt shift comes from vim's modal nature and its language of text objects. You start perceiving text as having an inherent grammar - "inside parentheses", "around word", "until comma." Text gains topology and structure that was invisible before.
The transformative part isn't the keystrokes but learning to think "delete inside quotes" (di") or "change around paragraph" (cap). You see text as composable objects with boundaries, not just streams of characters. This may even persists when you're reading on paper.
That mental model often transforms your keyboard workflow not just in your editor - but your WM, terminal, web browser, etc.
wagwang · 4h ago
Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem. They all rest on metaphysical axioms of which no one has any proof of. Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
glenstein · 27m ago
>Can we just all admit there has basically been no real progress made to the mind-body problem.
I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.
I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.
jibal · 3h ago
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism.
Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
geye1234 · 3h ago
One big problem with physicalism is that many alleged arguments in its favor are nothing of the sort. Any argument for physicalism that refers to neurological observation is invalid. Physicalism claims that all mental events can be reduced to physical events. But you cannot look at physical events to prove this. No matter the detail in which you describe a physical event, you can't use this to prove, or even argue in favor of, the thesis that all mental events can be reduced to the physical.
It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
jibal · 2h ago
You're making a number of unsupported assertions. There's a massive amount of literature in support of physicalism. And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid". No metaphysical stance can be proved.
> Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
This is simply wrong ... there are very strong arguments that, when we're looking at mental events, we are looking at the physical. To say that arguments for physicalism are limited to looking at the physical is a circular argument that presupposes that physicalism is wrong. The arguments for physicalism absolutely are not based at looking at a limited set of things, they are logical arguments that there's no way to escape being physical ... certainly Descartes' dualism is long dead due to the interaction problem -- mental states must be physical in order to be acted upon or act upon the physical. The alternatives are ad hoc nonsense like Chalmers' "bridging laws" that posit that there's a mental world that is kept in tight sync with the physical world by these "bridging laws" that have no description or explanation or reason to believe exist.
glenstein · 22m ago
Whoheartedly agree. I think what they're stressing though if I'm understanding correctly, is we do kind of start in a Cartesian space, and branch out via inferences to the presumption of an external world. And, from a certain philosophical perspective, one could point to that and insist that at any moment that connection could be the weak link that brings all of epistemology crashing down. We could get unhooked from the simulation, so to speak, open our real eyes, and witness a new world with new bedrock alternatives to our notions of causality, qualia, and so on.
I don't believe any of that to be true, but I think that's kind of the point of that argument. I do think we start from that Cartesian starting place, but once we know enough about the external world to know that we're a part of it, and can explain our mind in terms of it, it effectively shifts the foundation, so that our mental states are grounded in empirical reality rather than the other way around.
geye1234 · 2h ago
> And it's a far cry from "there's no proof of x" to "x is invalid".
Oh this is undoubtedly true, and my argument was limited to the statement that the most common argument for physicalism is invalid. I was not launching an attack on physicalism itself.
> No metaphysical stance can be proved.
That's an interesting metaphysical stance, but again, I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics, just pointing out the main weakness that I see in the physicalist argument. I'm pointing out that any pro-physicalist argument that is a variant of "neuroscience says X" is invalid for the reason I gave: by limiting your scope to S, you can say nothing about anything outside S. This is true regardless of whether there is actually anything outside S, so there is no assumption in my argument that physicalism is wrong.
One argument against physicalism is that if thought or knowledge can be reduced to particles bouncing around, then there is no thought or knowledge. My knowledge that 2+2=4 is about something other than, or different from, the particles in my brain. Knowledge is about the content of the mind, which is different from the associated physical state of the brain. If content is neurons, then content as something my mind considers doesn't exist. If my thought "2+2=4" just is a bunch of particles in my brain doing stuff, then my belief that my thought is true is not even wrong, as the saying goes: just absurd.
I'm no Cartesian dualist though -- the interaction problem is just one problem with his dualism. I think Aristotle and Aquinas basically got the picture of reality right, and their metaphysics can shed yuuuuge amounts of light on the mind-body problem but obviously that's a grossly unfashionable worldview these days :-)
jibal · 1h ago
> I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics
You attacked physicalism for not being proven.
I disagree with your arguments and I think they are hopelessly confused. Since our views are conceptually incommensurate, there's no point in continuing.
wagwang · 2h ago
I've never heard any argument that demonstrates any certainty around physicalism. I like the argument bcuz it sounds nice, but I would never ever claim to know it to be true. I mostly arrived at physicalism because there are eggregious problems with the other theories and physicalism seemed like the suitable default naive answer.
You're getting a little ahead of yourself. First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality. That is, they need to be true or false, and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify. Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
jibal · 2h ago
> You're getting a little ahead of yourself.
Nonsense.
> First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality.
You're getting ahead of yourself to imply that somehow physicalism does not reflect reality, or that an assertion has to be proven to reflect reality before being made.
> That is, they need to be true or false
No, that's not what reflecting reality means. Of course ontological assertions are true or false, if they aren't incoherent, but that's neither here nor there.
> and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify.
What's this "they" that don't qualify? The subject was physicalism, and again almost all scientists and most philosophers of mind subscribe to it ... which leaves room for some not doing so. Whether or not the outliers are "prominent" is irrelevant.
> Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
That's a much stronger claim than that physicalism is wrong ... many dualists are ontological realists. And it's certainly convenient to claim that there are airtight arguments for one's views, and easy to dismiss the claim.
vehemenz · 3h ago
> Physicalism is about as plausible as solipsism
And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
geye1234 · 3h ago
Much of the mind-body problem comes from Descartes, who assumed that physical reality was nothing more than a bunch of particles bouncing around. Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around), then the mind must be something utterly unlike everything else in reality. Thus Descartes posits that the mind is one thing and the body another (substance dualism).
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
the_af · 3h ago
> Given that the mind cannot be reduced to this (whatever my experiences are, they are different from particles bouncing around)
Why cannot it?
geye1234 · 2h ago
Several reasons. One is that my experience of looking at a tree is one thing, but the neurological firing that takes place in my brain when I look at a tree is another. They are not the same. If you can reduce your experience of looking at a tree to neurons firing, then you are not really looking at a tree, and absurdity results.
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
the_af · 1h ago
I don't follow the reasoning at all. Why is human experience not the neurological firing? Why can't a thought be reduced to neurons firing, what about that would make it absurd?
I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.
It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
adityaathalye · 4h ago
If anything, it's getting weirder... real progress looks, well, batshit insane. For example:
Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin
I'm not sure how to answer the even more fundamental question, "What is it like to be yourself?" What constitutes a valid answer? It's a vague question.
jibal · 3h ago
I don't believe that the phrase "what it's like" (in this philosophical sense) is coherent. When people like Nagel or Chalmers are asked to explain it, they liken it to other incoherent assertions.
vehemenz · 3h ago
What's incoherent about it? Do you not think subjective experience has its own qualities? Breathing in fresh morning air, for example?
jibal · 2h ago
I stated what's incoherent about it. Your "Do you not think" is a non sequitur ... coherence is about meaning, and no one can say what the phrase means.
Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.
vehemenz · 1h ago
I'm sure you think you're well intended, but your attempts at rigor have me scratching my head a little bit. I don't understand the defensiveness given that you haven't done the bare minimum to explain your position.
And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.
jibal · 1h ago
What "defensiveness"? And you're accusing me of bad faith? Stick to talking about ideas, not people. I won't engage with you further.
the_af · 3h ago
True. I suppose every one of us has asked:
What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?
This has puzzled me since childhood.
card_zero · 3h ago
It's more or less OK, thank you for asking. Recently I felt:
Disappointed when I went somewhere and there wasn't any tea,
Enthralled by a story about someone guarding a mystical treasure alone in a remote museum on a dark and stormy night,
Sympathetic toward a hardworking guy nobody likes, but also aggravated by his bossiness to the point of swearing at him,
Confused due to waking up at 7 pm and not being sure how it happened.
You probably don't entirely understand any of those. What is it to entirely understand something? But you probably get the idea in each case.
Der_Einzige · 3h ago
Daniel Dennett was the only good part of the "New Atheism" movement. May he rest in peace.
vehemenz · 3h ago
The moniker was mostly invented by the press. But if we're talking about all four "horsemen," I think they all made positive contributions to their respective fields. Likewise, there are fair critiques one can level at each of them, including Dennett.
lenerdenator · 5h ago
[flagged]
dang · 3h ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We're trying for something else here.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
The author inventing "batfished" also believes bats to be conscious, so it seems a very poorly conceived word, and anyways unnecessary since anthropomorphize works just fine... "You've just gaslighted yourself by anthropomorphizing the AI".
Mostly people make things better over time. My bed, my shower, my car are all better than I could reasonably have bought 50 years ago. But the peculiarities of software network effects - or of what venture capitalists believe about software network effects - mean that people should give things away below cost while continuing to make them better, and then one day switch to selling them for a profit and making them worse, while they seemingly could change nothing and not make them worse.
That's a particular phenomenon worthy of a name and the only problem with "enshittification" is that it's been co-opted to mean making things worse in general.
— Kurt Vonnegut
In this sense, I think one has to aaaaaalmost be a bat in order to know what it is to be it. A fine thread trailing back to the human.
The imago-machines of Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire" come to mind. Once integrated with another's imago, one is not quite the same self, not even the sum of two, but a new person entirely containing a whole line of selves selves melded into that which was one. Now one truly contains multitudes.
Andy Weir's The Egg makes regular HackerNews appearances.
Of course it could all be claptrap that humans want to believe in but I find it to be pretty powerful and I think it is true
(Warning: Gets into spiritual stuff)
https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg?si=t9RqXgF_wwJPcv_g
I sometimes wonder about this, too. Do other people perceive things like I do? If someone was magically transplanted to my body, would they scream in pain "ooooh, this hurts, how could he stand it", whereas I consider the variety of discomforts of my body just that, discomforts? And similarly, were I magically transported to another person's body, would I be awestruck by how they see the world, how they perceive the color blue (to give an example), etc?
Yeah another example I think about from time to time is our own sense of perspective. It's all relative, but my sense of how far away is "that thing over there" is probably different from yours. Partially because we may be different sizes and heights, but also because our eyes and brains process the world differently. Like a camera with different lenses.
Also, speed. If your brain's clock is faster than mine then you may perceive the world to be moving slower than I do.
I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.
https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
Sure - although depending on how quickly one was scanning the environment with echolocation it might also feel a bit like looking around a pitch black room with a flashlight.
In any case it's essentially a spatial sense, not a temporal one, so is bound to feel more like (have a similar quale to) vision than hearing.
It's a hard-sci-fi story about how various societies, human and alien, attempt to assert control & hegemony across centuries of time (at times thinking of this as a distributed systems and code documentation problem!), and how critical and impactful the role of language translation can be in helping people to understand unfamiliar ways of thinking.
At the novel's core is a question very akin to that of Nagel's positivism-antipositivism debate [1]: is it possible (or optimal for your society's stability) to appreciate and emphasize with people wholly different from yourselves, without interpreting their thoughts and cultures in language and representations that are colored by your own culture?
What if, in attempting to do so, this becomes more art and politics than provable science? Is "creative" translation ethical if it establishes power relationships that would not be there otherwise? Is there any other kind?
Deepness is not just a treatise on this; it places the reader into an exercise of this. To say anything more would delve into spoilers. But lest you think it's just philosophical deepness, it's also an action-packed page-turner with memorable characters despite its huge temporal scope.
While technically it's a prequel to Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep, it works entirely standalone, and I would argue that Deepness is best read first without knowing character details from its publication-time predecessor Fire. Note that content warnings for assault do apply.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Deepness-Sky-Zones-Thought/dp/0812536...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.
In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?"
In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?"
In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?"
None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so.
Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.
As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.
Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness.
The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms.
To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is.
Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.
[0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/
Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.
I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood
I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.
But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.
Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that its impossible to know.
Indeed! Makes you think: maybe it's a bug rather than a feature.
The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.
To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…
…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.
Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.
The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.
That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.
"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states
"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states
Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"
edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)
> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.
How do you know that?
Philosophically, of course.
I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.
Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.
Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like:
(1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing)
(2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1)
(3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition)
=> Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3)
> Just that all models, however useful are still models
Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.
If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.
That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.
I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.
(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")
Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.
In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.
How would you describe the distinction?
> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"
Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.
The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".
"How any thought should produce a motion in Body is as remote from the nature of our Ideas, as how any Body should produce any Thought in the Mind. That it is so, if Experience did not convince us, the Consideration of the Things themselves would never be able, in the least, to discover to us." (IV iii 28, 559)
"It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. As a result, we tend "to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs."
But you would never know exactly what it feels to be a bat without removing your human level experience from the picture
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)
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)
Interesting. I would have said that something like that is the definition of reductionism.
>Consciousness doesn't need to be explained in terms of objective facts
If there's one good thing that analytic philosophy achieved, it was spending the better part of the 20th century beating back various forms of dualism and ghosts in the machine. You'd have to be something other than a naturalist traditionally conceived to treat "consciousness" as ontologically basic.
Sensory deprived, paralyzed, or comatose individuals can be conscious but have no means to experience the outside world, and depending on their level of brain activity, they might not even have an "inner world" or mind's eye experience.
Anything that is able to be measured is able to experience. A subject like an apple "experiences" gravity when it falls from a tree. Things that do not interact with the physical world lack experience, and the closest things to those are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). Truly non-interacting particles (NIP) are presumed to be immeasurable.
So there you have it. The conundrum that consciousness can lack experience and unconsciousness can have experience. A more interesting question in my opinion: what is a soul?
I was quite liking this explanation but you lost me here. I very strongly agree with your opening, and I think it's the key to everything. I think everyone insisting on a categorical divide runs into impossible problems.
And a good explanation of consciousness has to take the hard problem seriously, but doesn't have to agree that subjective and objective, or first person in third person or whatever you want to call them, are irreducibly distinct categories. But I think it makes more sense to say that some subset of all of the objective stuff out there is simultaneously subjective, rather than saying that all stuff at all times is both objective and subjective. I don't think an apple experiences gravity the way a mind experiences a conscious state, but I do think the through line of understanding them both as importantly physical in the same sense is key to tying physical reality to explanation of conscious states.
Also, if there is a soul, then how can we be confident concisouness arises from physical means? If there is a soul, it is the perfect means to differentiate concisouness and p-zombies.
If they don't have an "inner world"/"mind's eye" and are sensory deprived, in which sense can they be considered conscious? What is your definition here?
How can an apple "experience" gravity? I think you're overloading the term "experience" to mean two very different things, which happen (in some languages like English) to share the same word. You could say gravity "happens" to an apple, and then there's no confusion with subjective experiences.
If bats have no subjective experience it’s ethical to do anything to them but if there is than they deserve to (as all animals) be treated ethically as much as we can do so
IMO considering Bats to be similar to Mice -we’ve studied mice and rats extensively and while cannot know precisely we can be pretty sure there is subjective experience (felt experience there) ie almost our scientific experiments and field data with so called ‘lower’ organisms show evidence of pain, suffering and desires, play etc - all critical evidence of subjectivity
Now I don’t think bats are meta-conscious (meta cognitive) because they can’t commiserate on their experiences or worry about death etc like humans can but they feel stuff - and we must respect that
I bet if we could communicate with crows, we might be able to make some progress. They seem cleverer.
Although, I’m not sure I could answer the question for “a human.”
I don't understand why Wittgenstein wasn't more forcefully challenged on this. There's something to the principle as a linguistic principle, but it just feels overextended into a foundational assumption that their experiences are fundamentally unlike ours.
(More Daniel Dennett)
Here's Billy the bat perceiving, in his special sonar sort of way, that the flying thing swooping down toward him was not his cousin Bob, but a eagle, with pinfeathers spread and talons poised for the kill!
He then points out that this story is amenable to criticism. We know that the sonar has limited range, so Billy is not at least perceiving this eagle until the last minute; we could set up experiments to find out whether bats track their kin or not; the sonar has a resolution and if we find out the resolution we know whether Billy might be perceiving the pinfeathers. He also mentions that bats have a filter, a muscle, that excludes their own squeaks when they pick up sonar echoes, so we know they aren't hearing their own squeaks directly. So, we can establish lots about what it could be like to be a bat, if it's like anything. Or at least what is isn't like.
Nagel's paper covers a lot of ground, but none of what you described has any bearing on the point about it "what it's like" as a way to identify conscious experience as distinct from, say, the life of a rock. (Assuming one isn't a panpsychist who believe that rocks possess consciousness.)
Struggling to make sense of this sentence.
Or in a simpler way, consciousness is present just in case being that organism has an inner, subjective character - something that can not be reduced to a purely material state.
Bringing it back to bats, a failure to imagine what it's like to be a bat is just indicative that the overlaps between human and bat modalities don’t admit a coherent gluing that humans can inhabit phenomenally.
There's something more to it than this.
For one thing there's a threshold of awareness. Your mind is constantly doing things and having thoughts that don't arrive to the threshold of awareness. You can observe more of this stuff if you meditate and less of this stuff if you constantly distract yourself. But consciousness IMO should have the idea of a threshold baked in.
For another, the brain will unify things that don't make sense. I assume you mean something like consciousness is what happens when there aren't obstructions to stitching sensory data together. But the brain does a lot of work interpreting incoherent data as best it can. It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
> It doesn't have to limit itself to coherent data.
There are specific failure cases for non-integrability:
1. Dissociation/derealization = partial failures of gluing.
2. Nausea = inconsistent overlaps (ie: large cocycles) interpreted as bodily threat.
3. Anesthesia = disabling of the sheaf functor: no global section possible.
At least for me it provides a consistent working model for hallucinogenic, synesthesia, phantom limb phenomena, and split-brain scenarios. If anything, the ways in which sensor integration fails are more interesting than when it succeeds.
The way I look at it is that the sensors provide data as activations and awareness is some output with a thresholding or activation function.
Sense making and consciousness in my mental model is something that happens after the fact and it tries to happen even with nonsense data. As opposed to -- as I was reading you to be leaning toward -- being the consequence of sensory data being in a sufficiently nice relationship with each other.
If I've understood you correctly, I'll suggest that simple sensory intersection is way way not enough: the processing hardware and software are material to what it is like to be someone.
How it at all related to let's say programming?
Well, for example learning vim-navigation or Lisp or a language with an advanced type system (e.g. Haskell) can be umwelt-transformative.
Vim changes how you perceive text as a structured, navigable space. Lisp reveals code-as-data and makes you see programs as transformable structures. Haskell's type system creates new categories of thought about correctness, composition, and effects.
These aren't just new skills - they're new sensory-cognitive modalities. You literally cannot "unsee" monadic patterns or homoiconicity once internalized. They become part of your computational umwelt, shaping what problems you notice, what solutions seem natural, and even how you conceptualize everyday processes outside programming.
It's similar to how learning music theory changes how you hear songs, or how learning a tonal language might affect how you perceive pitch. The tools become part of your extended cognition, restructuring your problem-space perception.
When a Lisper says "code is data" they're not just stating a fact - they're describing a lived perceptual reality where parentheses dissolve into tree structures and programs become sculptable material. When a Haskeller mentions "following the types" they're describing an actual sensory-like experience of being guided through problem space by type constraints.
This creates a profound pedagogical challenge: you can explain the mechanics of monads endlessly, but until someone has that "aha" moment where they start thinking monadically, they don't really get it. It's like trying to explain color to someone who's never seen, or echolocation to someone without that sense. That's why who's never given a truthful and heartfelt attempt to understand Lisp, often never gets it.
The umwelt shift is precisely what makes these tools powerful - they're not just different syntax but different ways of being-in-computational-world. And like the bat's echolocation, once you're inside that experiential framework, it seems impossible that others can't "hear" the elegant shape of a well-typed program.
There are other umwelt-transforming examples, like: debugging with time-travel/reversible debuggers, using pure concatenative languages, logic programming - Datalog/Prolog, array programming, constraint solvers - SAT/SMT, etc.
The point I'm trying to make - don't try to "understand" the cons and pros of being a bat, try to "be a bat", that would allow you to see the world differently.
Indeed, basic vim-navigation - (hjkl, w, b) is muscle memory.
But, I'd argue the umwelt shift comes from vim's modal nature and its language of text objects. You start perceiving text as having an inherent grammar - "inside parentheses", "around word", "until comma." Text gains topology and structure that was invisible before.
The transformative part isn't the keystrokes but learning to think "delete inside quotes" (di") or "change around paragraph" (cap). You see text as composable objects with boundaries, not just streams of characters. This may even persists when you're reading on paper.
That mental model often transforms your keyboard workflow not just in your editor - but your WM, terminal, web browser, etc.
Exhibit a
> Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals (particularly mammals), even though it is "difficult to say [...] what provides evidence of it".
I think we've made extraordinary progress on things like brain to machine interfaces, and demonstrating that something much like human thought can be approximated according to computational principles.
I do think some sort of theoretical bedrock is necessary to explain to "something there's like to be" quality, but I think it would be obtuse to brush aside the rather extraordinary infiltrations into the black box of consciousness that we've made thus far, even if it's all been knowing more about it from the outside. There's a real problem that remains unpenetrated but as has been noted elsewhere in this thread, it is a nebulous concept, and perhaps one of the most difficult and important research questions, and I think nothing other than ordinary humility is necessary to explain the limit an extent to which we understand it thus far.
Physicalism is an ontological assertion that is almost certainly true, and is adhered to by nearly all scientists and most philosophers of mind. Solipsism is an ontological assertion that could only possibly be true for one person, and is generally dismissed. They are at opposite ends of the plausibility scale.
It's like describing the inside of a house in very great detail, and then using this to argue that there's nothing outside the house. The method is explicitly limiting its scope to the inside of the house, so can say nothing about what's outside, for or against. Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
> Same with physicalism: most arguments in its favor limit their method to looking at the physical, so in practice say nothing about whether this is all there is.
This is simply wrong ... there are very strong arguments that, when we're looking at mental events, we are looking at the physical. To say that arguments for physicalism are limited to looking at the physical is a circular argument that presupposes that physicalism is wrong. The arguments for physicalism absolutely are not based at looking at a limited set of things, they are logical arguments that there's no way to escape being physical ... certainly Descartes' dualism is long dead due to the interaction problem -- mental states must be physical in order to be acted upon or act upon the physical. The alternatives are ad hoc nonsense like Chalmers' "bridging laws" that posit that there's a mental world that is kept in tight sync with the physical world by these "bridging laws" that have no description or explanation or reason to believe exist.
I don't believe any of that to be true, but I think that's kind of the point of that argument. I do think we start from that Cartesian starting place, but once we know enough about the external world to know that we're a part of it, and can explain our mind in terms of it, it effectively shifts the foundation, so that our mental states are grounded in empirical reality rather than the other way around.
Oh this is undoubtedly true, and my argument was limited to the statement that the most common argument for physicalism is invalid. I was not launching an attack on physicalism itself.
> No metaphysical stance can be proved.
That's an interesting metaphysical stance, but again, I'm not trying to prove any metaphysics, just pointing out the main weakness that I see in the physicalist argument. I'm pointing out that any pro-physicalist argument that is a variant of "neuroscience says X" is invalid for the reason I gave: by limiting your scope to S, you can say nothing about anything outside S. This is true regardless of whether there is actually anything outside S, so there is no assumption in my argument that physicalism is wrong.
One argument against physicalism is that if thought or knowledge can be reduced to particles bouncing around, then there is no thought or knowledge. My knowledge that 2+2=4 is about something other than, or different from, the particles in my brain. Knowledge is about the content of the mind, which is different from the associated physical state of the brain. If content is neurons, then content as something my mind considers doesn't exist. If my thought "2+2=4" just is a bunch of particles in my brain doing stuff, then my belief that my thought is true is not even wrong, as the saying goes: just absurd.
I'm no Cartesian dualist though -- the interaction problem is just one problem with his dualism. I think Aristotle and Aquinas basically got the picture of reality right, and their metaphysics can shed yuuuuge amounts of light on the mind-body problem but obviously that's a grossly unfashionable worldview these days :-)
You attacked physicalism for not being proven.
I disagree with your arguments and I think they are hopelessly confused. Since our views are conceptually incommensurate, there's no point in continuing.
and
https://faculty.philosophy.umd.edu/pcarruthers/NoM%20-%205.p...
Nonsense.
> First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality.
You're getting ahead of yourself to imply that somehow physicalism does not reflect reality, or that an assertion has to be proven to reflect reality before being made.
> That is, they need to be true or false
No, that's not what reflecting reality means. Of course ontological assertions are true or false, if they aren't incoherent, but that's neither here nor there.
> and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify.
What's this "they" that don't qualify? The subject was physicalism, and again almost all scientists and most philosophers of mind subscribe to it ... which leaves room for some not doing so. Whether or not the outliers are "prominent" is irrelevant.
> Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.
That's a much stronger claim than that physicalism is wrong ... many dualists are ontological realists. And it's certainly convenient to claim that there are airtight arguments for one's views, and easy to dismiss the claim.
And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
If one drops the assumption that physical reality is nothing more than a bunch of particles, the mind stops being so utterly weird and unique, and the mind-body problem is more tractable. Pre-17th century, philosophers weren't so troubled by it.
Why cannot it?
Another is that the propositions "the thought 2+2=4 is correct" and "the thought 2+2=5 is wrong" can only be true with regard to the content of a thought. If thought can be reduced to neurons firing, then describing a thought as correct or wrong is absurd. Since this is not the case, it must be impossible to reduce thought to neurons firing.
(Btw, the first paragraph of my previous comment is not my position. I am giving a three-sentence summary of Descartes' contribution to the mind-body problem.)
I promise I'm not being dense or rhetorical, I truly don't understand that line of thought.
It seems to me like begging the question, almost like saying "experience cannot be this, because it'd be absurd, because it cannot be this."
Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD5TOsPZIQY
Aside from that, breathing fresh air in the morning is an activity, not a "quality of subjective experience". Generally the language people use around this is extremely confused and unhelpful.
And no, that's not what a non sequitur is. And no, coherence is not just a linguistic idea. Then you try to explain what I "really mean" by "quality of subjective experience," and you can't even give a good faith reading of that. I'm really trying here.
What makes me me? Whatever you identify as "yourself", how come it lives within your body? Why is there not someone else living inside your body? Why was I born, specifically "me", and not someone else?
This has puzzled me since childhood.
Disappointed when I went somewhere and there wasn't any tea,
Enthralled by a story about someone guarding a mystical treasure alone in a remote museum on a dark and stormy night,
Sympathetic toward a hardworking guy nobody likes, but also aggravated by his bossiness to the point of swearing at him,
Confused due to waking up at 7 pm and not being sure how it happened.
You probably don't entirely understand any of those. What is it to entirely understand something? But you probably get the idea in each case.