more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
There is at least a lot that we can know about what it is like to be a bat, and Nagel has not given us a reason to believe there is anything interesting or theoretically important that is inaccessible to us.
Gist of Idea
We can know a lot of what it is like to be a bat, and nothing important is unknown
Source
Daniel C. Dennett (Consciousness Explained [1991], 14.2)
Book Ref
Dennett,Daniel C.: 'Consciousness Explained' [Penguin 1993], p.442
A Reaction
I agree. If you really wanted to identify with the phenomenology of bathood, you could spend a lot of time in underground caves whistling with your torch turned off. I can't, of course, be a bat, but then I can't be my self of yesterday.
| 2109 | Increase a conscious machine to the size of a mill - you still won't see perceptions in it [Leibniz] |
| 7392 | If a lion could talk, it would be nothing like other lions [Dennett on Wittgenstein] |
| 4161 | If a lion could talk, we could not understand him [Wittgenstein] |
| 7391 | We can know a lot of what it is like to be a bat, and nothing important is unknown [Dennett] |
| 7522 | A full neural account of qualia will give new epistemic access to them, beyond private experience [Churchlands] |
| 3148 | Dualist privacy is seen as too deep for even telepathy to reach [Rey] |
| 5341 | Only you can have your subjective experiences because only you are hooked up to your nervous system [Flanagan] |
| 2403 | Nothing in physics even suggests consciousness [Chalmers] |
| 5210 | We could know what a lion thinks by mapping both its brain patterns and its experiences [Douglas,A] |