What is it like to be a bat?

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). https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...

“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.

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. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

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)

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. [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