komponisto comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Yvain 27 March 2010 02:32PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (189)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: komponisto 28 March 2010 05:01:26PM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure it follows that a bat has one one-millionth the subjective experience of a human. The problem is that you can't necessarily add a bunch of bat-experiences together to get something equivalent to a human experience; in fact, it seems to me that this sort of additivity only holds when the experiences are coherently connected to each other. (If someone hooked up a million bat-brains into a giant network, then it might make sense to ask "Why am I a human, rather than a million bats"?)

So it may be, for instance, that each bat has 10% the subjective experience of a human, but that that extra 90% makes it millions of times more probable that the experiencer will be pondering this question.