“I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” American philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his classic 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” And “yet,” Nagel said, “if I try to imagine this, I am restricted by the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”
I was therefore fascinated to read in “The Blind Watchmaker” how Richard Dawkins conjectured that bats may use echoes to ‘see’ in much the same way as we use light to see color. Maybe, bats have an internal model that lets them translate their subjective sound impressions into distinct ‘sound colors.’
This is how Dawkin’s describes this beautiful idea: “Perhaps male bats have body surfaces that are subtly textured so that the echoes that bounce off them are perceived by females as gorgeously colored, the sound equivalent of the nuptial plumage of a bird of paradise. I don’t mean this just as some vague metaphor. It is possible that the subjective sensation experienced by a female bat when she perceives a male really is, say, bright red: the same sensation as I experience when I see a flamingo.”
Choosing mates based on the ‘sound color’ of their echoes, just like – or in fact not like – birds do with visually attractive feathers. Imagine this: colors of sound! What a beautiful idea that even if not my senses, but my mind can start to touch and decipher. The start of a slight divination of….what it is like to be a bat. 🦇
