What is it like to be a bat? It might seem a silly question, but as I start my new series in which I imagine my way into various animals’ heads, it is a perfect starting point. Why? Because it is a silly question that has taken up an enormous amount of earnest intellectual energy ever since the American philosopher Thomas Nagel first posed it in a celebrated 1974 paper.
Bats, he wrote, are sufficiently similar to us—as fellow mammals, and therefore close relations—to allow us to imagine that they might have a form of consciousness resembling our own. But they are different enough to make understanding that consciousness impossible.
It was not enough, Nagel argued, to imagine what it would be like to fly around at dawn and dusk, or spend the day hanging upside down. That would only tell us what it would be like to behave as a bat does. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” he says, but he seems to regard the requisite imaginative leap impossible.
Maybe. The gap in physiology and perception may look like too great a gulf for any flight of fancy. But is it?
As science advances, and ever deeper study is made of bats, the less impossible it seems to, at the very least, build up a sketch of what it might be like to be a bat. We know, for example, that bat vision is nowhere near as bad as previously thought. Far from being “blind as a bat,” many species of bat have acute sight, even if some dark cave-dwelling species see fewer colours. Others—mainly fruit bats—have binocular vision, suggesting depth perception like our own. Most bats use a combination of the visual and echolocation information to build a model of their surrounding environment.
Nor is their sonar (traditionally mislabelled a “sixth sense”) beyond our comprehension. A number of blind humans have developed a method of echolocation, producing regular clicks with their mouths and interpreting the way the sound bounces off the scene around them.
Daniel Kish, one of the best-known practitioners, is able to ride a mountain bike thanks to the technique; he describes each click as offering a snapshot in time—a strobing sort of sense that builds a picture of the landscape, and the moving parts within it. “Every surface has its own acoustic signature,” he has explained.
Sound has long been used as a tool of human navigation. The 1944 scientific paper that introduced the term echolocation noted how “in fog-bound coastal waters, the captain of a ship often blows a whistle and listens for an echo from cliffs or rocks.” Perhaps the gulf between bat and human isn’t as large as we might think.
Still, bats’ ultrasonic clicks and trilling are clearly beyond our capability. I remember standing in the dark late one spring evening, listening to a “bat detector” that converted high-frequency sounds beyond the scope of human hearing into audible ones. Small shapes flipped and tripped through the air above our heads—silent and barely detectable. But through my earphones their chattering cacophony was revealed. Did I know what they were saying? No. Could I imagine what they were up to? No. But, equally, I felt closer to them than Nagel suggested that I could be.
Presuming to enter the minds of other species can be a dizzying activity, as one tries, and sometimes fails, to let go of all we know and are, but to me it is an endlessly fascinating one. In this column, we will be studying the interior lives of animals. Think of it as an intellectual exercise and a form of philosophic play.
We may not need to take it quite so far as Charles Foster, the ethicist and barrister, in his brilliant, and brilliantly eccentric 2016 book Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide. For a chapter on inner-city foxes, he “lay in a backyard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where [he] was, waiting for the night.” I admire his dedication, but I think I’ll stick to thought experiments.
