Reading through Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" [1] I was reminded of my insight into this batty idea.
Nagel considers the bat because of the bat's sonar - a sense we do not possess. But an entirely novel perception would soon acquire familiar qualia [2] such as good (a good thing perceived) bad, close, far, hard soft and numerous other correlations that are shared between senses. For instance, comfy beds look soft - the feeling of softness, the qualia, is borrowed from senses other than vision (bounciness, for instance, must come from a rather complex collective motion sense). The bigger contrast with the bat is not so much the qualia associated with the new or novel sense, but the question of whether that qualia exists for the bat at all.
We can not say if the qualia that any of us experience is anything like the qualia experienced by any other person. Love is a common, robust, but extremely complex emotion possibly involving numerous qualia. But the qualia associated with redness, for instance, is relatively simple. Some of us like red, some respond to red in a way possibly associated with more primal instincts ie the association with blood, fear, aggression and fear, others have qualia similar to attractiveness etc.
I propose that the experience that other animals enjoy is not barred from our own experience. Some of what it is like to be a bat is accessible.
Consider all sensory input summed into a single inwardly directed vector and all effector outputs to be summed into a single outwardly pointing vector. The first observation one can make of this simplified vector model is that not all of what can be sensed travels to the limit of the inwardly pointing vector before a response to that sensed information is initiated (to imagine these two vectors try to think of something like the London underground railway map that shows a simplified summed representation of all the railway routes.)
We note that some responses are initiated almost at the sensing site. Some sense+response signals continue along the sensing vector but others do not. The plexus are neural networks outside the brain that take care of various functions that need not trouble the conscious mind. Much of the activity at the plexus level is not reported.
One can consider the experience at certain points along the incoming vector. Only the complete journey, taking some two seconds from sensor to effector, is higher consciousness. Thus we have lower consciousness responses that higher consciousness is not responsible for eg 1) reflexive response (genetically programmed); 2) conditioned response (adapted during maturation); 3) learnt automatic response (eg, any skill, riding a bike, typing with more than two fingers); 4) repetitive response (shelling peas after a while, playing a game as you get the hang of it); 5) considered response (drawn from memory but scrutinised); 6) contemplated response (draw only problem solving tools and strategies from the memory).
They are approximate points along the vector (where information passing up the sense vector may cross to the effector vector). Time taken for response will lengthen - at (1) it is immediate, at (6) it is around 1.5 seconds minimum to hours, days, months or years.
I propose that simpler animals have a shorter vector pair. To know what it is like to be an ant, consider only (1). Note that there is still the sense+response that still may pass all the way to higher consciousness (which dutifully takes responsibility for ALL actions including many of those it could not possibly have initiated or caused).
If we can concentrate on the sense to response processing that occurs at certain levels we can gain some insight into the level of awareness for those animals. As all levels of processing occur all the time, we can ask what it felt like to move every muscle while walking. Well, you didn't feel much, and neither do the animals that process only on that level.
Note that higher consciousness means longer vector pair where the length of the vector pair is given by such factors as time taken to process, processing ability as compared to other animals and so on.
Dogs, cats and other domestic pets seem to take much longer to "think" about things. This seems to indicate that taming has the additional effect of allowing the animal to utilise the entire length of their vector pair as a normal rather than rare form of information processing and decision making.
The chimpanzee, when faced with a banana suspended overhead, will make short and ill considered attempts to get the banana ahead of a loss of temper. After this the animal seems to think about the problem and may arrange boxes so as to climb up and get the banana. A little more thought might result in bitting mischievous keepers who place the 'narnies out of reach.
The above indicates that the longer vector pair, whilst available for use by non-human animals, is utilised only as a last resort. In the chimp's higher consciousness the tools for problem solving are recalled rather than just previously successful tactics. This takes much more time and processing capacity.
Considering all the senses summed into a single inward pointing vector and all the effectors likewise summed into a outward pointing vector and considering the point at which inward coming sensory information may be processed and pass to the outward going effector vector, a much greater insight into the experience of non-human animals that may either have an intrinsically shorter vector pair or who are compelled to utilise only the shorter route may be gained.
Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.
[1] Nagel, Thomas: "What is it like to be a bat?", From The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50. http://members.aol.com/NeoNoetics/Nagel_Bat.html
[2] Qualia, the feeling of what it is or the feeling evoked by a perceived entity eg the redness of a rose.
© Robert Karl Stonjek 2003