Whale, Bat

I commonly make the mistake of pitying various animals for their lot in life. It's something I'm working on.

A whale has to spend most of its time holding its breath. On the surface (no pun intended), this seems rather uncomfortable. But I am confident that a whale's perception of breath-holding is largely different from ours, and not only because it is "used to it." A whale only needs to take a breath every so often - what is it? Every thirty minutes? Longer? (Is anyone here a marine biologist?) As well, the surface is always just lying there; the whale can go up for a fresh breath essentially any time it wants. I can imagine, therefore, that a whale's experience breathing is more analogous to a human's experience eating. The whale gradually hungers for air, and decides with slowly-mounting urgency that it needs to stop what it is doing and refill.

Conversely, a whale's experience eating may be much more analogous to our breathing experience than eating. According to Wikipedia, blue whales intake a great deal of water per krill swallow. It seems then that whale food is all around the whale, dissipated through its atmosphere. Granted, a whale could likely last longer on krill-less swims than could a human on oxygen-less breaths, but the action of eating, for a whale, may be mundane compared to a lovely trip up to the air-water interface. And when boy whales muster up the gumption, they may ask girl whales whether they might join them for a breath, rather than a bite.

Similarly, I think humans are disposed towards pitying bats for their blindness. Yes, we know they have radar detection, and can navigate through caves and detect insects using echolocation, but echolocation is not vision, so as sophisticated a system as echolocation might be, the poor bat is still blind and can't see where it's going.

All true, if to see is to detect and interpret a certain range of electromagnetic frequencies. But this is a narrow definition, I think, compared to what the important aspects of sight are to those of us who have it. What we rely on is an image of our surroundings that our brain can make something of. Our eyes supply this by detecting what we biasedly call visible light.

A bat emits sounds and uses the loudness and delay of the echoes to tell what is around it. We humans can hear as well, and we know that hearing is not sight; indeed, to us, hearing is much less sensitive and useful, in most cases, than sight. But I imagine, and this is basically pure conjecture here, but I imagine that were a human to have a truly batty experience, that is, to have his sight removed and be blessed with echolocation, aside from being really funny to look at, screaming all the time, it would not be long before he described his echo-locating as an image of sounds around him. That it, I think bats have an image in their heads of their surroundings, and therefore should not be thought of as blind at all. Indeed, I would understand the bats pitying us: all we can detect are bouncing lights. In their absence, we are blind. So long as a bat isn't hoarse it can always see.

Picture (a loaded word that I can't escape) the perception of a fly by a bat. We can't really know what it's like. But it's much more acute than a normal human's: bats literally survive by doing the Mr. Miyagi chopsticks thing. What we do know is that there is a fly ahead of the bat, which fly the bat senses and eats. My guess is that the bat makes what most people would call an image of the fly, and therefore the bat is only blind by a very narrow definition.

But taking this line of thinking a little farther, the crux of the matter is what the bat-homunculus is like. For at one (rather objective) level, what does it matter? Humans detect energy and consume it; bats do, too. Molecules dance around and find themselves at lower energy states. NEWSFLASH!

But the cool thing, to your faithful 'Dlogger, is that objective nature is examined by subjective agents whose very subjectivity is also examinable, but only by other subjective agents, who have a hard time objectively characterizing it. A fun time, but a hard time.