@philosophyminis: In 1974, Thomas #Nagel gave us one of the most bizarre but philosophically exciting questions of all time: ‘What does it feel like to be a bat?’ This doesn’t mean imagining yourself upside down and trying to catch insects in your mouth, because that’s not what it feels like to be a bat. That’s a human behaving rather oddly. You see, we know a lot about bats. We know that they use echolocation to navigate their environment, and this means using high-frequency shrieks to reflect on objects and to then ‘correlate outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes.’ From this, a #bat will develop a picture of the external world. Or so we suppose. Because while we know everything we can about a bat’s brain and we can pretend this is ‘comparable to vision,’ we can never truly know what it’s like to perceive the world with bouncing sound waves. For Nagel, this shows how ‘completely unequipped’ we are to understand the inner #subjective experience of a bat, or an alien, or a dog, or each other. Our inner life is completely inaccessible to everybody else. But this doesn’t mean that we cannot imagine or try to empathize with other people. It just means that the success or failure of that depends on how similar you are to that person. Or, in other words, everything that we imagine is coloured by what we, ourselves, know. #philosophy #epistemology #mind #empathy

Jonny Thomson

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Thursday 25 July 2024 19:37:27 GMT