It is Impossible to Accurately Imagine What is it like to...

It is Impossible to Accurately Imagine What is it like to be a Bat Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat... - Thomas Nagel In order to take the above request seriously, one must assume that bats have experience and consciousness. Assuming so, one must then imagine the consciousness that a bat must live with. Its brain is designed to correlate outgoing impulses with subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables the bat to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision.†¦show more content†¦Is a bat aware of its own existence? If a bat is not aware of its own existence, then the above question is immediately answered: a bat simply flutters around carrying out its activities of life, experiencing nothing, just living. If a bat is aware of its existence, there are infinitely more questions to be raised to discover exactly what life as a bat is like. Many would argue that the key difference between the human consciousness and that of a bat is vision - I disagree. In order to see its world, a bat relies on sound and echoes to create the complex world that a human sees by vision; is that a key difference? The difference in the electromagnetic sound waves and light waves is little more than wavelength and frequency, therefore it is very reasonable to assume that a bats vision is nearly as accurate as a humans, perhaps better if the bouncing waves are sent frequent enough to produce a constant image. Vision is not a key difference, but only an integral part of the sensory system that produces any creatures consciousness. For the most accurate depiction, one would need to know how a bats senses of smell, taste, and touch compare to that of a humans, or more importantly, how a bat thinks. 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