It’s hard: To be a bat
A new study helps to answer the question raised in Thomas Nagel‘s 1974 philosophy essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? A team of Chinese and British researchers focuses on an aspect of bat-ness that Nagel ignored: fellatio.
Nagel, a professor then at Princeton University, now at New York University, published his batty – batty in the truest, best sense – musings in a scholarly journal called Philosophical Review.
He explained that: “bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.”
A quarter century later, Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang came up with an alternate method….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.