1339: Nagel’s Batshit
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/25
Nagel may have been assuming a structural independence more egregious than substrate independence assumed by computer scientists working on AI now. To be a bat, to have vision, is to have a particular living structure with particular functions, those functions derive from the structure, change adaptively to it, but ultimately structure with similarities to others in nature will mostly have similar functions. In a sense, we do know what it is like to be as a bat by extension and science-based inference.
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