Let me tell you about a bat

Can you hear me? If I’ve done everything right, you should have a subjective experience that you’d hopefully agree is your consciousness. This is something I read when I was in college: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel. This writing stuck with me because I often question what it might be like to be something else—whether that’s my roommate’s cat, Spicy, a specific ant or bug, or another human. I’ve always been curious about what it’s like to perceive from their point of view and how differently life would be if I had the same perspective. What ideas would I have about the world? How would I imagine fairness in a world where I had to use gills to breathe? How does breathing work for a shark? (By the way, I have since found my answer, and it’s all thanks to the internet. But if you’re curious, here’s the cliff notes: They don’t take a refreshing breath the way we do. Picture water flowing over their gills and filaments, oxygen diffusing into their bloodstream.) LMAO. I find it almost even crazier that creatures like octopuses have neurons in their skin. That’s how they change color and shape to match their environment. Can you imagine if all sensations and thoughts going on in your head were happening across your body and externally—not just behind your eyes? Crazy, right?

Growing up where I’m from, there were confusing times occasionally when people were mean to me for no apparent reason. They’d shout things out the window at me and even tell me that they couldn’t be my friend. But I always imagined it was just because I didn’t understand where they were coming from, and if only I did, it would make sense. The last time I had an experience that reminded me of my childhood in a similar fashion was when I lived with a bat. Yes, let me go into that story. Once upon a time, I lived on 11 1/2 Street and I had an encounter with a bat, and it was unforgettable, well a bat and a squirrel but that’s for another day.

The first experience was when I was sleeping. I heard banging on my door, and my friend Droop was telling me, “B.J., come out here! There’s a bird in here! There’s a bird! Come out and help, there’s a bird!” I stepped out of my room, and I did see something flying around. But it wasn’t a bird—wait a minute—are those teeth? It looked like a damn bat. A more intense encounter followed months later. I remember watching a movie and falling asleep on my back with my laptop in hand. Next thing I know, I hear a loud crash inside my room. I’m half dazed, but I still knew there was something in here, and I could hear wings flapping. That’s when I realized—yep, the damn bat was in my room. I jumped up, turned the light on, and lo and behold, there’s a bat circling the light as soon as the lights came on. It had just come inches from my face. Wild.

After we released the bat back into the wild, I remember lying there wondering, “I wonder what that experience was like for him? I wonder if he thought that my attic was his home. I wonder if he could even see the light since he was circling it.” I was just full of questions. Ironically enough, the next year I took a philosophy course that had me read Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat?. Nagel writes: “The essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat… but bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any senses that we possess, and there’s no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.” (Page 438)

Consciousness exists everywhere. It happens at so many levels of animal life, and it’s hard to say where it begins and ends. Some even argue that only humans truly have it. But if you’ve ever had a pet, you probably know better. Nagel’s point is that no matter how advanced technology gets, you can’t reduce consciousness to physical mechanisms, try as we might. This means your experience is special—so special and mysterious that we still don’t have a solid framework to talk about it. And yet, it’s the most abundant thing in your life, the most inescapable thing you deal with as soon as you open your eyes. Every person you meet carries the same floating mystery in their head—behind their eyes, in between their ears.

Speaking of what goes on in between your ears, did you know some people have an inner voice narrating their thoughts, while others don’t hear anything at all? Did you know that some people can rotate objects in their mind and visualize the process, while others can’t picture it without physically turning the object? However, they can still complete the task and get the answer the same way, so there’s no internal “movie” of the object rotating, but rather, they don’t have that process at all. Yet, they can still provide the correct solution when identifying whether an object is in the correct orientation. I know someone who doesn’t think in full sentences and I don’t know how to interpret that data, to me that is what thinking is.

Anyway, I wanted to wrap this up by letting you know that you should never take existing for granted. It’s the most special thing that well… exists?