11 January 2015

What is it like to be an alien?

Thomas Nagel’s philosophical essay entitled “What is it like to be a bat?” examines the problem of imagining how another being can perceive with more or less different sensory organs than ours’. Its conclusion is that even if we would be able to become gradually a bat, we wouldn’t be able to experience a bat’s world since our brain is not hard-wired for its life and for example, to navigate with echolocation. It is reasonable to extend this thought experiment to the hypothetical, intelligent aliens – after all, if we cannot imagine a mammal’s perception although it is closely related to us form evolutionary perspective, then we have no chance to imagine how and what an alien creature perceive.
But this bat-metaphor is seriously flawed. The “other minds” problem refers to that question in philosophy that how we could justify that other humans have similar minds than our own. From epistemological approach, the problem is that there is a fundamental difference between accessing our own and others’ experience. I have a firsthand experience about my visual, hearing, etc. impressions, but I cannot access another humans’ firsthand experiences. I don’t have a direct knowledge about it.
It is unquestionable that there are differences between the nature of an experience I experienced directly and another which was told me by you. But the fundamental question is not whether we: you and I are the same person (obviously not), but the similarities/differences between your and my perception, and although we cannot ascertain whether another human has the same experience, there are at least two solutions.
1. Historian David Hackett mentions “the fallacy of metaphysical question” which is “an attempt to resolve a nonempirical problem by empirical means” [Historians Fallacies 1970, p. 12]. In other words: the problem of other minds (or bat perception or alien thoughts, if you prefer) is simply unanswerable from a philosophical point of view. It is impossible to know “what is it like to be a bat” or another person or alien.
2. On the other hand, if one focuses not on the fact that different beings perform the observations, but on the causes which give reason to believe in similarities between their perceptions, then the overall picture would change. The operation of our senses adapted to our environment, so it is a sound argument that humans sensory organs operates similarly. Thus the effects they result are more or less similar too, and we do not have reason to presume that your and mine experiences are radically different. Because our common evolutionary origin I can imagine what you perceive.
A bat is our more distant relative than another humans. We can imagine with less certainty “what is it like to be a bat?” than “what is it like to be a human?”, but it doesn’t mean that we cannot imagine at all.
Hypothetical aliens are formed by the same evolutionary processes than us. Perhaps the gravitation, atmosphere and other parameters of their habitats are different, but the logic of evolutionary adaptation excludes certain solutions and supports others, so the space-phase of possibilities is restricted. Perhaps there are many forms of both life and intelligence in the Universe, but it isn’t mean that there aren’t rules. Similarly, the distance between us and an alien is surely bigger than between us and a chimpanzee. But difference not necessarily means that something is totally unimaginable.

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