by Grace Boey
What is it like to be a bat? Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously posed this question in 1974. As he noted, the question is one that cannot be answered: no matter how many objective, scientific facts we may discover about a bat’s physiology or neurobiology, we can never access its subjective, personal experience. Phenomenal consciousness – or qualia – is a private, opaque matter. Nagel’s question (and lack of an answer) is one that almost all philosophy freshmen are acquainted with.
But long before I’d heard of Nagel – or the mind-body problem of philosophy – I’d already developed a few ideas of my own about bats. As a child, I’d been enchanted by the tale of Stellaluna, a baby fruit bat who is accidentally separated from her mother. My own mother would often read the book to me at bedtime; I’d fall asleep thinking about brave Stellaluna who befriends a group of baby birds, reluctantly learns to eat worms, and is taught to sleep the wrong way up. When Stellaluna and her mother are finally reunited, both are overjoyed – and the baby bat finally feels like she is someplace she belongs. According to the story, bats are capable of complex emotions, preferences and desires – just like us.
Stellaluna is a wonderful children’s tale. But, as a scientific description of bat psychology, the text is clearly lacking. It is questionable whether bats are capable of possessing mental states such as ‘bravery’, ‘love’ or ‘belonging’, or whether they are capable of establishing ‘friendships’. The text commits what scientists refer to as ‘anthropomorphism’ – the act of assigning human-like qualities to non-human animals. Among scientists, anthropomorphism has become somewhat of a dirty word.
It is certainly unwise to blanketly assume that non-human animals have inner mental lives identical to those of humans. Yet it also seems unlikely that non-human animals have no mentality at all. If excessive anthropomorphism is a sin, then so is excessive anthropocentrism. In all likelihood, the truth about non-human animal minds lies somewhere in between. What, then, is the ‘correct’ way to interpret animal behaviour? This question comes with significant stakes, since how we relate to non-human animals is guided by what we believe about their minds. Unfortunately, the task of animal psychology is rife with methodological and philosophical difficulties. It would certainly be responsible for us to gather as much accurate, relevant scientific data as we can – but as Nagel has pointed out, the best we can do from there is still to guess.