Why You Can’t Know What It’s Like for a Bat to Be a Bat with Jackie Higgins

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We can never know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat. Or even if there is something that it is like for a bat to be a bat. But if there is something, we would speculate that the bat has some kind of consciousness or sentience. That’s the argument Jackie Higgins makes in her new book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, in which she takes us on a deep dive into the sensory experience of many different animals, from fish to owls, to moles, to cheetahs. Jackie is a television documentary director and writer. She read zoology at Oxford University as a student of Richard Dawkins and then worked for Oxford Scientific Films, where she spent a decade making wildlife films for the BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic, and The Discovery Channel. She then moved in-house at the BBC for another decade, working for their Science Department, researching, writing, directing, and producing films for many programs, from Horizon to Tomorrow’s World. Join Indre and Jackie today for their fascinating conversation regarding Jackie’s ‘joyful exploration of what it means to be human’. https://inquiring.show/episodes/375-why-you-cant-know-what-its-like-for-a-bat-to-be-a-bat-with-jackie-higginsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science
0:06.4	a richer, more rewarding life.
0:10.7	Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.
0:14.2	This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.
0:18.2	We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.
0:26.6	One of my most favorite essays, and I'm not alone in this, it's very popular,
0:35.9	was published in the Philosophical Review and was written by
0:39.4	Thomas Nagel in 1974. It's called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Nagle observes that an organism
0:48.1	has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism, something it is like
0:57.7	for the organism. That means that I can simulate the sensory experiences of a bat. I can learn to
1:04.7	echolocate. I can hang from a tree upside down. I can spend my days sleeping and my night searching for insects,
1:13.1	but I will never know what it's like for a bat to be a bat. And is there something that it is
1:19.9	like for a bat to be a bat? And if there is, then we would argue that there is some kind of
1:26.6	consciousness, some sentience that the bat has.
1:31.0	That's the argument that Jackie Higgins makes for the very premise of her book, Sentient,
1:36.8	how animals illuminate the wonder of our human senses.
1:40.8	In it, she takes us into a deep dive into the sensory experiences of many different animals,
1:46.5	from fish to owls to moles to cheetahs. And by considering what the subjective experience might be
1:54.1	of another organism, an organism whose sensory receptors are very different from ours, whose nervous system might be completely
2:02.9	different, like the distributed nervous system of a cephalopod, also helps us understand what it's
2:09.1	like to be human. After talking to Annie Murphy-Paul about our extended mind, about how our
2:16.2	environment and various other factors influence how
	...

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