‘After the aircraft came to a standstill, “we were upside down hanging like bats,” [a passenger] said.’
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Our own experience provides the basic material for our imag-
ination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try
to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables
one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s
mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the sur-
rounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound
signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by
one’s feet in an attic. 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. Yet if I try to imagine this, I
am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those re-
sources are inadequate to the task.
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Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” suggests that there are limitations to the simile.