“That’s the question a philosopher named Thomas Nagel asked, so many decades ago. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ He was trying to make a point about how impossible it is to imagine oneself having a sensory apparatus as different from ours as a bat’s. That even to conceive of what it’s like to navigate the world with sonar, you would have to take up the bat’s point of view. But you can’t—you might be able to take up a different point of view a little, but the more distant you are from it—let’s say the more alien it is to you—the harder it is to answer the question.”
