What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Nagel, Thomas

doi:10.2307/2183914

Cited by 5,178 publications

(1,710 citation statements)

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“…The, so-called, hard problem is an offspring of this dualist tradition. Indeed, today, it is common in the study of consciousness to pay tribute to the division between the Hard Problem and the Easy Problems (HPEP) [6] or the, socalled, explanatory gap [7]: how can we explain the 'raw feel' of the experience of being like something such as Thomas Nagel or his notorious bat [8]? However, behind this profoundness hides a simple syllogism: Science advances third person descriptions of natural phenomena; Conscious experience is first person, therefore, Consciousness cannot be described by science.…”

Section: Introduction 'That Is Very Hokey!'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic consciousness: the distributed adaptive control perspective

Verschure

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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One contribution of 13 to a theme issue 'The major synthetic evolutionary transitions'. Understanding the nature of consciousness is one of the grand outstanding scientific challenges. The fundamental methodological problem is how phenomenal first person experience can be accounted for in a third person verifiable form, while the conceptual challenge is to both define its function and physical realization. The distributed adaptive control theory of consciousness (DACtoc) proposes answers to these three challenges. The methodological challenge is answered relative to the hard problem and DACtoc proposes that it can be addressed using a convergent synthetic methodology using the analysis of synthetic biologically grounded agents, or quale parsing. DACtoc hypothesizes that consciousness in both its primary and secondary forms serves the ability to deal with the hidden states of the world and emerged during the Cambrian period, affording stable multi-agent environments to emerge. The process of consciousness is an autonomous virtualization memory, which serializes and unifies the parallel and subconscious simulations of the hidden states of the world that are largely due to other agents and the self with the objective to extract norms. These norms are in turn projected as value onto the parallel simulation and control systems that are driving action. This functional hypothesis is mapped onto the brainstem, midbrain and the thalamo-cortical and cortico-cortical systems and analysed with respect to our understanding of deficits of consciousness. Subsequently, some of the implications and predictions of DACtoc are outlined, in particular, the prediction that normative bootstrapping of conscious agents is predicated on an intentionality prior. In the view advanced here, human consciousness constitutes the ultimate evolutionary transition by allowing agents to become autonomous with respect to their evolutionary priors leading to a post-biological Anthropocene.This article is part of the themed issue 'The major synthetic evolutionary transitions'.

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Section: Introduction 'That Is Very Hokey!'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthetic consciousness: the distributed adaptive control perspective

Verschure

2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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“…Additionally, Kant (1781Kant ( /1997 suggested that 'simultaneity or succession would not themselves come into perception if the representation of time did not ground them a priori', thereby laying theoretical grounds for the existence of internal operations underlying the temporal structuring of perception. The operational and internal constraints that shape perception are crucial for one's conscious appreciation of the world: suffice to consider the seminal thought experiment on what being a bat is like ( Nagel 1974). From an evolutionary standpoint, the temporal constraints that primates are endowed with may be very different from, say, those of a snail for which Mozart sonata would have to be played so slow that it would lose any perceptual coherence for the human ear (Brecher 1932;Blumenthal 1977).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minding time in an amodal representational space

Wassenhove

2009

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

151

105

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How long did it take you to read this sentence? Chances are your response is a ball park estimate and its value depends on how fast you have scanned the text, how prepared you have been for this question, perhaps your mood or how much attention you have paid to these words. Time perception is here addressed in three sections. The first section summarizes theoretical difficulties in time perception research, specifically those pertaining to the representation of time and temporal processing. The second section reviews non-exhaustively temporal effects in multisensory perception. Sensory modalities interact in temporal judgement tasks, suggesting that (i) at some level of sensory analysis, the temporal properties across senses can be integrated in building a time percept and (ii) the representational format across senses is compatible for establishing such a percept. In the last section, a two-step analysis of temporal properties is sketched out. In the first step, it is proposed that temporal properties are automatically encoded at early stages of sensory analysis, thus providing the raw material for the building of a time percept; in the second step, time representations become available to perception through attentional gating of the raw temporal representations and via re-encoding into abstract representations.

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“…Even though sentience is not a perfectly precise concept [38], and even though we lack the means for truly assessing qualia (subjective experiences) of life forms other than humans [39], it is almost certain that we humans are not the only life form capable of experiencing pain and pain-related su ering and that many animals on our planet are sentient as well [40]. Sentient extraterrestrial life forms require a di erent moral stance than non-sentient life forms.…”

Section: Non-primitive Sentient Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

Political, moral, and security challenges of space colonization

Kovic¹

2018

Preprint

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Space colonization, the goal of establishing permanent and self-sustaining human habitats beyond Earth, is not only a technological challenge: Colonizing space will confront humankind with a set of political, moral, and security challenges. If the outcomes of those challenges are negative, space colonization will either fail completely (political challenges), or we will commit potentially immense moral damage (moral challenges), or we will expose humankind to enormous security risks (security challenges). In order to minimize these risks, we need to start crafting policy blueprints today that are aimed at steering space colonization in a desirable direction 3 Space colonization ZIPAR Discussion Paper Series

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What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Cited by 5,178 publications

References 1 publication

Synthetic consciousness: the distributed adaptive control perspective

Synthetic consciousness: the distributed adaptive control perspective

Minding time in an amodal representational space

Political, moral, and security challenges of space colonization

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