Getting to the other end of the corridor: Bat vs. Human perception

‘’There is a well-known paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel called ‘What its like to be a bat?’. The paper is not so much about bats as about the philosophical problem of imagining what it is like to be anything that we are not....’ Reflection on Extract of Richard Dawkins “The Blind Watchmaker” (page 40-44)

Lets imagine that a bat and a human enter a small corridor with the mission to make it to the other end of the corridor.  It equally beneficial for both beings to avoid hitting any large protruding objects on their way, and so in such both rely on their perception of the room to determine where theses objects are.

Their way of perceiving the room will differ as a bat will rely more on the human interpretation of what is hearing, perceiving through ‘echoes’, and the human must rely on sight, which for the blind bat might seem like a ‘flabbergasting’ concept of which they possibly interpret as ‘heat’ or the exploitation of some unimaginable concept called light.

A bat ‘clicks’, to interpret the corridor. The human opens his eyes. Both will immediately see the corridor and decided on the passage they will take, regardless both animals will be receiving and interpretation the outside information and ‘translating’ it into nerve impulse.  The bat makes it safely through the passage using echolocation,’ using sound information very much like we use our visual information’; a concept humans can model mathematically, and artificial but never fully experience. That we have never experienced is key to understanding why we will never fully be able to imagine what its like to be a bat. We can model mathematically, artificial, or simple sit and try to imagine.  Very simply imagining hearing a bell for every inch of surface area on one of theses protruding objects. The intensity of the sound would allow you to interpret the size and distance of the object from you. We would imagine the bats flight down the corridor as a load interpretation, and see the humans as a silent visual walk.

Out of body experiences are unforgivably rare and without experiencing being a bat flying down corridor, we can never really say what exactly the corridor would feel like for the bat, and how exactly it is to see as a bat.  How would you rather see? For now I leave you to assume that for the bat sight is like ours, and respect that both the bat and the human will reach the other end of the corridor safely.  

Also enjoyed reading: http://protomag.com/assets/natures-design