What Is It Like to Be a Bat 的阅读笔记。

Reductionism 是什么意思：

还原论是一种哲学思想，认为复杂的系统、事务、现象可以通过将其化解为各部分之组合的方法，加以理解和描述。

——维基百科

认为意识是 mind-body 问题的关键。而意识的本质是主观体验。

But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.

因此，从功能和意图的角度去分析都是错误的，这两者都可以通过编程达成，而不必有任何体验。

这里还提到主观体验最重要的就是有一个 point of view，而很多还原主义的研究方法都站在客观角度抛弃了这个主观视点。不禁想到复旦李剑锋提出的意识模型——小系统 vs 世界的大系统，两者之间的介面和交换构成了意识活动。

文章之所以选取蝙蝠作为例子，似乎是因为蝙蝠恰好具有独特的感知器官，而又不至于让人觉得太 exotic，开始怀疑他们是否确实有体验。

独特的感知器官（声呐）意味着，我们将不能用自己的人类经验来推论蝙蝠的主观体验会是什么样。

This brings us to the edge of a topic that requires much more discussion than I can give it here: namely, the relation between facts on the one hand and conceptual schemes or systems of representation on the other.

作者特意说明，这篇文章里提到的 POV 不是专属于一个个体，而是一类 POV。

后面实在太长了，探讨的问题也比较古老，看得呵欠连连，直接跳到最后几页吧。

I should like to close with a speculative proposal. It may be possible to approach the gap between subjective and objective from another direction. … Though presumably it would not cap ture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.

原来作者志在于提出一种描述方式来桥接、沟通不同的主观体验。前文还质疑了「客观经验」这个概念的合理性。

But whether or not this guess is correct, it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind body problem without sidestepping it.