Abstract
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.
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Notes
In addition to their intrinsic interest, our views on animal consciousness have obvious ethical ramifications.
A certain degree of haziness might be unavoidable and there are probably many penumbral cases. Part of the difficulty might be that science-friendly philosophers are not always explicit about precisely how science sits within their epistemology of mind. Perhaps further work could help clarify what is at stake and where people stand. The present work itself, as one referee observed, is arguably some kind of neurophilosophy.
Skepticism about bat consciousness, and indeed most animals, would seem to follow from higher-order accounts which are often assumed to imply that most, or perhaps all, non-humans are not conscious in virtue of the fact that they do not token beliefs about beliefs. Akins’ view is that bats (and presumably many other animals) do not token even primitive beliefs and desires, and so fail to satisfy the more generous interpretation of global availability offered by first-order representational accounts.
And notwithstanding the presence of some highly selective auditory neurons, the bat’s brain may well also contain other populations sensitive to wider ranges of stimuli.
Are cognitive maps necessary or sufficient for global representation? Perhaps they aren’t sufficient—a robot guided by GPS can navigate. Are they necessary? That’s also contentious since it depends on one’s theory of mental representation (e.g. are representations map-like or sentence-like?).
I am indebted to Chris Stephens for this nuance in my interpretation of Akins.
Johan Elköf deserves credit for the points made in this paragraph.
Might this (finally) call for an application of “similarity-based” supervenience (Kim, 1987)?
In answer to Block’s question “how can science based on us generalize to creatures that don’t share our physical properties?” (2002, p.16), it can be replied that they may nevertheless share our functional properties.
Strawson was, of course, opposed to Quine on a range of fundamental issues, including the epistemic value of conceptual analysis and apriori philosophizing, the analytic-synthetic distinction, skepticism about meaning and reference, and, naturalized epistemology.
Of course, what it is like to be pregnant would be left out, but noting that fact does no favors for Churchland’s argument.
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Acknowledgments
I am in debt to Chris Stephens for his comments and criticism, as well as Brock Fenton and Johan Eklöf for lending their expertise and helping me cope with the empirical literature. I also thank the anonymous referees for their insightful feedback.
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Allen-Hermanson, S. Strong Neurophilosophy and the Matter of Bat Consciousness: A Case Study. Erkenn 80, 57–76 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9612-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9612-2