Member-only story
Why Full Empathy Is Impossible
And what it’s like to be a bat
You could make a meal of a moth, hang upside down and sleep, flap your arms and try to fly, and close your eyes and navigate by sound; but you will never, never really know what it’s like to be a bat.
For starters, even if you were able to choke down a moth and fall asleep while hanging upside down, I don’t think you’ll succeed in flying. If you navigated by sound, it would be the sound of you crashing into things. But, even if you could, you still would not know what it’s like to be a bat. The best you could do is know what it’s like for a human to be a bat. That’s not even close to the same thing.
You might think you know something about flying if you’ve ever been in an airplane; but, in reality, you didn’t fly as a bat flies, you were shot through the air by a machine while sitting in a metal tube.
You might think you know something about navigating by sound if you’re a sonar operator; but, you’re not navigating by sound, a machine is doing it for you. That’s very different than being born with the capability and doing it naturally.
What it’s like to be a bat was the subject of an important essay by philosopher, Thomas Nagel. He was interested in refuting reductionism, the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing more…
