As he writes in Being a Beast, he finds himself tuning into his senses, like smell, in new ways, and discovers a powerful connection to his animal compatriots. When writer Charles Foster set out to understand a set of animals-badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift-he did so by living like them, and among them, for weeks at a time. (It is a book with lots of sneaking.) A loud noise can effectively blind them, as can too many other people talking at once.
It changes their perceptive abilities, and their sense goes beyond the receptive-they perceive the world in vague shapes through passive sonar until they send out a click that gives clarity but also reveals their query to anyone who might be around to observe. He brings us inside their experience, a world known through a rich sonar that senses space as well as language. And here, Cambias imagines people who look something like massive crayfish.
Deprived of sunlight, the whole ecosystem draws energy from undersea volcanic vents, so life-and society-concentrates around these structures. Cambias’ A Darkling Sea, intelligence has evolved on just such a world. It’s a rich and strange ecosystem for science fiction writers to imagine us into. On worlds with subsurface oceans, like some of our outer-solar-system moons, the whole livable environment would be completely lightless. Just as bats make their way in darkness, so too do creatures in the darkest depths of the sea. Nagel chooses bats because, as mammals, he believes they are safely attributed consciousness but, in an inversion of the swimmer who finds himself beheld by a familiar consciousness in a whale’s eye, Nagel writes, “even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.” Nagel awards consciousness to far more animals than we might think of as humanlike or intelligent-not only bats but also mice, pigeons, and whales. It does not require intelligence, thought, or self-reflection, just the awareness of being. He writes, “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” Consciousness, then, is the ability to experience existence. But around the edges of Nagel’s project, like tasty crumbs, we can grab at some useful ideas for imagining minds even stranger than bats: the minds of intelligent aliens.įirst, Nagel gives us a helpful entry into the question of consciousness. His project is to interrogate “the mind–body problem,” the struggle in philosophy or psychology to reduce the mind and consciousness to objective, physical terms. (As a friend put it, it should actually be called “We Will Never Know What It’s Like to Be a Bat, Alas.”) But Nagel is not even interested in questions of batness. Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” unfortunately does not endeavor to answer its titular question. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.
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