Imagine yourself as a star-nosed mole. You are about the size of a hamster, and you live most of your life underground in darkness. For this reason, you depend upon the eleven pairs of pink sensors that jut out from the front of your face. You depend upon them for everything: to sense the tunnels around you, the objects you encounter, the food before you. These sensations are nearly instantaneous, reaching the brain in about ten milliseconds. Imagine yourself rooting about in the dark, living by the pressure on the front of your face, forming a vision of the world entirely via touch.
We might be forgiven for assuming that other creatures perceive the world more or less as we do. But we would be mistaken. Our world is full of creatures with sensory organs so different from our own as to render their lives unimaginable to us. This is the premise of the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s groundbreaking essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”: “In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” If one’s perceptions constitute one’s sense of being in the world, then how could we possibly hope to imagine ourselves in the lives of those whose perceptions are nothing like our own?
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