WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT

Many many years ago, when I was but a youth
I studied to all hours in a frantic search for Truth
I was sitting in my study, 'midst the books that I had read
When I glanced out of the window, and a bat flew overhead
And I thought:

What is it like to be a bat?
Oh, if only I knew that!
I could probably explain
All the secrets of the brain
If I knew what it was like to be a bat

It seemed to me the answer to the riddle of the mind
Would be found in the experience of those least like humankind
In unfamiliar qualia, like those of the bat who hears
The echo of an insect in its ultrasonic ears
And I thought:

What is it like to be a bat?
Oh, if only I knew that!
I could be more self-aware
I could become department chair!
If I knew what it was like to be a bat

It turned into a passion, then an all-consuming mania
My research took me far and wide, till I reached Transylvania
And there beneath a castle tossed by storms and lost in mist
The townspeople declared the local noble could assist
Could tell me:

What it was like to be a bat?
Oh, if only I knew that!
I could see with different eyes
I could win a Nobel Prize!
If I knew what it was like to be a bat

The noble said he'd help me, and I babbled out my thanks
He responded with a smile, and it looked a lot like fangs
I really don't remember much that happened after that
But when I awoke that evening, I could turn into a bat.

What is it like to be a bat?
Oh, I finally know that!
Now I sleep within a coffin
And don't see the sun too often
But I know what it's like to be a bat

What is it like to be a bat?
Oh, I'm an expert on that
I was bookish once, and stuffy
Now I live in fear of Buffy
But I know what it's like to be a bat

WE DIDN'T START THE FIRE (GRAND FINALE)

Thales, Socrates, Zeno and Empedocles
'Naximander, 'Naximenes, Anaxagoras
Logos eros ontos noos, square of the hypotenuse
Echecrates, Archelaus, and Protagoras
Gorgias, Parmenides, Strato and Diogenes
Euclid writes his Elements, Pyrrho says he's not convinced
Aristotle, Plato, Cicero and Cato
Plotinus, Apollodorus, come on baby sing the chorus

[Chorus: We didn't start the fire!
It was always burning since the dawn of learning!
We didn't start the fire!
Each new sage and writer makes it even brighter! ]

Augustine, Boethius, Erigena Scotus
Avicenna, Avicebron, Al-Ghalazi
Gregory, St. Bernard, Heloise and Abelard
Terms exist, Eucharist, Christ's divinity
Necessary entities, Moses ben Maimonides
Anselm's ontological, Summa Theologica
Occam, Buridan, Aristotle's back again
Angels, free will, origin of evil!

[Chorus]

Renaissance, The Prince, Luther founds the Protestants
Earth goes round the sun, Calvin and Melancthon
Telescopes, More's high hopes, mystics and reformist popes
Galileo, Giordano Bruno

Cogito ergo sum, Francis Bacon, deism
Jesuits, Mersenne, Sweden has a Catholic queen
Hobbes, Locke, Cherbury, tangents, probability
Natural law, pumping air, Newton lays the heavens bare!

[Chorus]

Bishop Berkeley, Leibnitz, who discovered calculus?
Voltaire, David Hume, Malthus fears impending doom
Adam Smith, dogmatic slumber, greatest good for greatest number
Mill, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Darwin hits religion hard
Comte, James, Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, will to power
Here's a hand, plain as day, what else do I have to say!

[Chorus]

Freud, Jung, morning star, Russell's new Principia
Carnap wants concreteness, Godel's incompleteness
Tarski, Popper, dasein, late and early Wittgenstein
Ryle, Turing, Sartre thinks life is boring
Ayer, Quine, rights for blacks, trolley car is off its tracks
'Pologetics, new aesthetics, Rawls, Searle, cybernetics
Chomsky, Rorty, Nagel's bats, modal logic, brains in vats
Virtue ethics redux - preach it baby all is flux!

We didn't start the fire!
It was always burning, since the dawn of learning!
We didn't start the fire!
But the more we know, the brighter it will glow...
...and grow...and grow...and grow...

[Chorus]

ZOMBIES' SECRET

The soul is an illusion
A cause of much confusion
And very little gain
And the facts would be consistent
If my soul were nonexistent
If I only had a brain

I'd unravel schemes Cartesian
Replacing them with reashon
And make things clear again
I'd elucidate how mostly
I'm a shell, but not so ghostly
If I only had a brain

Oh I
Can't tell you why
So many folk expound
On mental states they don't know how to ground
When no such states
Are to be found!

I'd abandon all reliance
On fields less pure than science
Confusing in the main
Talk of mind would be denotin'
Simple acts of cells and prot'in
If I only had a brain