Oct 24, 2026, 7:54 PM

@ireneista @xgranade It is a quite good exploration of The Hard Problem. But one thing I took with me from it is this: A bat can meaningfully be called 'conscious' iff there is something it is like to be a bat. In other words, if bats have subjective experiences.

Nagle argues that:

1. It *is* like something to be a bat; bats do have subjective experiences.
2. This "something" is so fundamentally alien to humans (because of bats' very different sensory apparatus) that it is effectively impossible for humans to accurately imagine what being a bat is like.
3. These two are not in conflict: A human being unable to imagine what being a bat is like reflects limitations of human imagination, not of bats' experiential lives.

I don't think there is anything it's like to be a rock, or an LLM. But I think there *is* something it's like to be a frog (even though it's not at all like being a human).

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