On Not Knowing What It’s Like

On Not Knowing What It’s Like

How much do I not know about what it’s like? How extensive is my ignorance of the different forms of consciousness? I do know what it’s like to be me now—about my current conscious states. They act as input to my knowledge faculty and that faculty produces knowledge of them as output. We can also safely say that I know what it’s like to be a molecular duplicate of me now, because it has precisely the same conscious states as I do now. On the other hand, I don’t know everything about what it’s like to be a bat: I do know a bit about some of the bat’s experiences, because I have similar experiences, but not about its echolocation experiences, which I don’t have. Phenomenal similarity determines what I know and don’t know. Between these two extremes, however, opinions may differ. I will argue that we have a spectrum of ignorance here, with some cases hard to decide, not a sharp binary distinction. On balance, I think our ignorance is far more extensive than is commonly recognized—we know precious little about what it’s like for subjects of consciousness. At the same time, we know more about it in certain cases than has sometimes been supposed. The operative notion is incomplete knowledge: we have varying degrees of knowledge, more or less complete, with incompleteness as the rule. The bat is more known than some people seem to think and the human less known. There is actually a vast range of cases to consider and much epistemic complexity. Complete knowledge of what it’s like is actually sharply limited, as it turns out. In some cases, we might not know (or be able to know) whether we can know another subject’s consciousness, because we cannot gauge the degree of similarity between us. Maybe I know what it’s like to be him (or it) and maybe I don’t know—it’s difficult to tell. And this kind of ignorance can have practical and ethical significance—such knowledge can be useful.

Let’s start with our old pal, the bat. We know quite a bit about what it’s like to be a bat, as much as we know for any mammal: the bat sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels fear, etc. He isn’t all that mysterious. It is only when the bat gets to echolocating that our knowledge encounters an obstacle, because we don’t echolocate—there is nothing internal we can consult. But even here all is not ignorance, since the bat is using its ears to process the echoes—and we have ears too. So, we know a little about what it’s like to echolocate like a bat—we have heard echoes. Also, we are familiar with judging distance and movement by means of the visual sense, so we can use this knowledge to get an idea of the bat’s sensory state. What we don’t know is what it’s like to use sounds to judge spatial properties—though even that might be surmountable by learning. Let’s say the bat’s experience overall is 95% knowable, as things stand. The bat is thus (only) a partial mystery to us. But what about the cat? Cats are nocturnal, so they have no qualms about the spending the night outside alone. My cat has no problem lying down on a concrete driveway all night when he could just as easily sleep on a comfy bed inside (he prefers this during the day). I find this incomprehensible; presumably, he feels the “call of the wild” when night falls, whereas I feel the “call of the bed”. He must have an experience at night that I don’t have; I don’t know what it’s like to have this experience. Is it anything like my experience of enjoying natural scenery or the starry sky? Not much. To that extent, my cat is a mystery to me. He also likes to bite the tails off living lizards and eat them; I don’t have this preference. I can’t really compare his experience to my own, except to say it’s a sort of eating. I don’t know what it’s like to eat a lizard’s still-writhing tail; it’s a bit like eating asparagus, perhaps, but not completely. Ditto for holding a live rat in my mouth—I have never done anything close to that. Do I know what it’s like to fly like a bird? Not really; I can only guess and imagine. Do I know what it’s like to have the body of a whale? Er, no. And so on and so on. I don’t know much about what it’s like to be any other species, because my experience is limited to being of the human species. I don’t even know what it’s like to brachiate like a bonobo, and we are close genetically. This is an area of deep (though partial) ignorance.

But the point also applies within the human species. Do I know what it’s like to be a woman? Up to a point, but no further. I don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant and give birth, or feed a baby at my nipple. I don’t know what it’s like to menstruate. These are all mysteries to me, more or less deep. I can try to imagine, but I can’t really know—fully, completely. Maybe my imaginative efforts are woefully wide of the mark. How much do I know about what it’s like to be a man of another race, of another size, in a different place, at a different time? I can guess, but how accurately I can’t say. I know a certain amount about what it’s like to be another man, but not everything. Come to think of it, how much do I know about what it’s like to be me in the past, or the future, or in a counterfactual situation? I don’t know what it was like for me as a baby or even as a teenager (though I have faint recollections), and I don’t know what it will be like to be me when I am old and feeble and losing my mind. Still less do I know what it would be like to be me in the field of battle or paralyzed or super-rich. It took having a serious operation to teach me what it is like to have a serious operation (not great). So it goes with illnesses and the like. We don’t know a lot about ourselves outside of our actual present experience; we may think we do, but we don’t, not fully. You don’t know what it is like to be consumed with anger until you are consumed with anger (again, not great). States of consciousness are hard to know unless you have experienced them directly (and can recall them accurately). We really know only a tiny island in a vast sea (which includes our own experience outside the here and now). The bat lies within the gates. The human hangs upside down in a cave and uses echolocation, an alien to himself. Can I really know what it is like to be you—with your body, your background, your desires, your personality? Aren’t you something of a mystery to me, though I have partial knowledge of your form of consciousness. Aren’t we all like bats to each other? I think I know what it’s like to be you, roughly, but maybe I am mistaken—maybe you are not as similar to me internally as I naively suppose. Consciousness is supremely knowable from the inside, but from the outside it is frustratingly elusive. We know it when we see it, but we often don’t see it. Consciousness has an egocentric epistemology.[1]

[1] The physical world, by contrast, has an allocentric epistemology: that is, knowledge of it is focused on the other rather than the self. Physical objects are objects of sensory knowledge, especially visual; we do not know our own body better than other bodies, as a matter of principle. I can know a bat’s body as well as I know a human body. There is no restriction of physical knowledge to one’s own body and anything similar to it. But knowledge of consciousness in general is restricted to knowledge of one’s own consciousness and anything similar to it. Alien minds defeat our cognitive capacities; not so alien bodies. We can then put the point of Nagel’s “Bat?” paper by saying that physicalism cannot be true of consciousness because consciousness has an egocentric epistemology while the body and brain have an allocentric epistemology.