Philosophers have recently argued that since there are people who are blind, but don't know it, and people who echolocate, but don't know it, conscious introspection is highly unreliable. I contend that a second look at Anton's syndrome, human echolocation, and ‘facial vision’ suggests otherwise. These examples do not support skepticism about the reliability of introspection.

Many philosophers have held that we cannot say what it is like to be a bat as they present a fundamentally alien form of life. Another view held by some philosophers, bat scientists, and even many laypersons is that echolocation is, somehow, at least in part, a kind of visual experience. Either way, bat echolocation is taken to be something very mysterious and exotic. I utilize empirical and intuitive considerations to support an alternative view making a much more (...) mundane contention about bat phenomenology: echolocatory experience probably just has an auditory character. These points also call for further reflection on our intuitions about animal consciousness and standard arguments for the explanatory gap. (shrink)

What does it feel like to be a bat? Is conscious experience of echolocation closer to that of vision or audition? Or do bats process echolocation nonconsciously, such that they do not feel anything about echolocation? This famous question of bats' experience, posed by a philosopher Thomas Nagel in 1974, clarifies the difficult nature of the mind–body problem. Why a particular sense, such as vision, has to feel like vision, but not like audition, is totally puzzling. This (...) is especially so given that any conscious experience is supported by neuronal activity. Activity of a single neuron appears fairly uniform across modalities and even similar to those for non-conscious processing. Without any explanation on why a particular sense has to feel the way it does, researchers cannot approach the question of the bats' experience. Is there any theory that gives us a hope for such explanation? Currently, probably none, except for one. Integrated information theory has potential to offer a plausible explanation. IIT essentially claims that any system that is composed of causally interacting mechanisms can have conscious experience. And precisely how the system feels is determined by the way the mechanisms influence each other in a holistic way. In this article, I will give a brief explanation of the essence of IIT. Further, I will briefly provide a potential scientific pathway to approach bats' conscious experience and its philosophical implications. If IIT, or its improved or related versions, is validated enough, the theory will gain credibility. When it matures enough, predictions from the theory, including nature of bats' experience, will have to be accepted. I argue that a seemingly impossible question about bats' consciousness will drive empirical and theoretical consciousness research to make big breakthroughs, in a similar way as an impossible question about the age of the universe has driven modern cosmology. (shrink)

This paper assesses five main empirical scientific arguments against the reliability of belief formation on the basis of introspecting phenomenal states. After defining ‘reliability’ and ‘introspection’, I discuss five arguments to the effect that phenomenal states are more elusive than we usually think: the argument on the basis of differences in introspective reports from differences in introspective measurements; the argument from differences in reports about whether or not dreams come in colours; the argument from the absence of a correlation between (...) visual imagery ability and the performance on certain cognitive tasks; the argument from our unawareness of our capacity of echolocation; the argument from inattentional blindness and change blindness. I argue that the experiments on which these arguments are based do not concern belief formation on the basis of introspection in the first place or fail to show that it is unreliable, even when limited to introspection of phenomenal states. (shrink)

Nagel (1974) kickstarted a now-long tradition in the Philosophy of Mind of using thought experiments to elucidate the relationship between conscious experience and the body, and the difficulties of explaining its character in a pure physicalist fashion. In this article, Nagel points out that, even though we know a lot about how bats use echolocation to navigate and make sense of their environments, these (naturalistic, mechanical) explanations don’t help us to imagine what it is like to be a bat, (...) how their inner experience is qualitatively different from ours. Recent research in the novel area of Plant Cognition (Calvo 2016, Calvo & Lawrence, 2022) has strongly, albeit controversially, suggested that some plants and fungi exhibit fitness-increasing behaviors that strikingly resemble aspects of animal cognition, even in the absence of a dedicated, central nervous system: they seem capable of sensing/perceiving their environment, form memories and learn from past experiences, make anticipatory decisions regarding their current state and the environment, and communicate and behave as a coordinated collective. On the other hand, in the Philosophy of Mind, there has been an increasing interest in non-representational forms of cognition. The 4E Cognition movement has suggested that representational, intentional cognition only emerges when more basic cognitive abilities (imitation, communication, and language) are already in place and that most cognitive activities don't involve contentful representation. This leaves open the possibility of basic fungal cognition, sophisticated enough to explain the behaviors exhibited by the Infected in The Last of Us. Regarding the relationship between plants and fungi, Simard (2018) has suggested that the symbiosis between these organisms confers cognitive abilities to the trees and plants involved in this relationship, mainly abilities such as learning, communication, and a type of intelligence based on memory. When the symbiosis occurs within a forest ecosystem, the participating fungi act as nodes in a network, being a link between the different trees colonized by a certain fungus. By achieving a free-scale ecosystem interconnection within forests (Beiler et al. 2015; Beiler and Simard 2010), fungi act as mediators between plant organisms, providing a substrate for direct communication between symbiotic agents based on chemical and electrical signals (Simard et al. 1997; Song et al. 2015). This suggests Clickers not only use echolocation, but also an underground communication network established from the symbiosis between plant and fungus, allowing recognition of the space in which they are located and adaptation within it. This article will attempt to explain how Clickers gain basic echolocation given the loss of neural cognitive resources, in order to explain how this mixed/symbiotic cognitive agency, if ever possible, might be explained. (shrink)

In “What is it like to be boring and myopic?” Kathleen Akins offers an interesting, empirically driven, argument for thinking that there is nothing that it is like to be a bat. She suggests that bats are “boring” in the sense that they are governed by behavioral scripts and simple, non-representational, control loops, and are best characterized as biological automatons. Her approach has been well received by philosophers sympathetic to empirically informed philosophy of mind. But, despite its influence, her work (...) has not met with any critical appraisal. -/- It is argued that a reconsideration of the empirical results shows that bats are not boring automatons, driven by short input-output loops, instincts, and reflexes. Grounds are provided for thinking that bats satisfy a range of philosophically and scientifically interesting elaborations of the general idea that consciousness is best understood in terms of representational functions. A more complete examination of bat sensory capabilities suggests there is something that it is like after all. -/- The discussion of bats is also used to develop an objection to strongly neurophilosophical approaches to animal consciousness. (shrink)