"I was able to imagine what a bat would think if it were a bat." That's a line from another post, and something I thought I'd come up with my own sweet self. But philosopher Thomas Nagel got there first, in an article I had previously read:
"It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms … and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this … 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."
(“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.4 (October, 1974): 439.
Nagel goes on to point out that we humans cannot accurately imagine what is like to be a bat because we lack the proper sensory apparatus and mental structure. Here I completely agree with him. Indeed when if I hear someone at the dog park tell me about a pet psychic receiving or “flashing on” a scene from their dog’s memory, some traumatic event from their puppyhood, I am always tempted to ask: “what color was the scene?” If the psychic were sharp, he or she might say it was black and white. The only problem is that dogs are not entirely colorblind. They can perceive subtle shades of violets and blues. They just aren’t very interested in them. Unlike us, they did not evolve hunting for brightly colored fruits.
So if you really want to test someone who claims to be a pet psychic, ask them what colors they see when they connect with a dog. But at the Ashland dog park, what goes around comes around, so I tend to hold my tongue. It seems far more likely to me that a dog would have experienced a traumatic smell as a puppy, or a traumatic blur of motion, both being essential to its brain structure and, prior to domestication, its very survival.
While I may not be able to accurately imagine what is like to be a bat any more than I can, ultimately, imagine what it is like to be another person, I can imagine something different from my own experience, and that imagining can increase my chances of communicating successfully.
What I actually imagined when confronted with a bat in the house was from an episode of Batman: the Animated Series. It was an episode featuring Robert Langstrom, a scientist who, with the help of a serum, becomes a man-bat hybrid. As a child reading comic books, Manbat fascinated me. I think it was because although his name implied a kind of reverse symmetry with Batman, he was actually different in kind. For Bruce Wayne, Batman is a metaphor, albeit one that often threatens to consume him. For Robert Langstrom, Manbat is a physical transformation, a hybrid that falls outside our normal categories for thinking of either a man or a bat.
The way the animated show imagined echolocation was to give it a visual analog: echoes showed up as splotchy images that flashed and faded after the initial echo. Not entirely unlike a blip on a radar screen, but with more resolution and three-dimensionality. Given that my species evolved swinging from branches, vision—especially depth-perception—was important to our survival. So we tend to prefer our information visually. The animated show’s attempt to render Manbat’s point-of-hearing as a point-of-view took advantage of this preference.
It was this visual image I remembered when I was trying to get the bat out of our house. I thought something along the lines of “what would make a really large, bright blip—a wall of input—to this bat?” I chose a board and the board worked. My attempt to communicate was successful.
Here we get to what, for me, is the crux of the matter: my successful communication had nothing to do with the bat perceiving my intent. It was not at all important that the bat understand why I wanted him to leave, or even that I was a being who wanted him to leave. What was important was that the bat left.
This is a more challenging, and in many ways less comforting, way for me to experience a connection with another being than believing that we somehow understand each other’s intent. Social animal that I am, I like to believe that other beings and I are on the same page when we interact.
Actually, I think there are ways—at least as fellow mammals—that the bat and I can be on the same page. But it has to do, not with shared sensation and cognition, but with fellow feeling. Not with sensory perception or intuited intents, but with limbic systems. But that must wait for another post.
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