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.
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.
— 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.
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2025/06/30/what-is-it-like...
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.)
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.”
(More Daniel Dennett)
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".
Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with diverse intelligences - by Michael Levin
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.
And while you're at it, as plausible as any metaphysical theory, insofar as you're still doing metaphysics.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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 their is no such agreed description.
"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"
"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)
Continental philosophy: What would it be like to live among the marginalized in a community of vampire squid thousands of leagues beneath the surface of the sea?
vehemenz•2h ago
ebb_earl_co•1h ago