375: Why You Can’t Know What It’s Like for a Bat to Be a Bat with Jackie Higgins
“I can simulate the sensory experiences of a bat. I can learn to echolocate, I can hang from a tree upside down. I can spend my day sleeping and my night searching for insects. But I will never know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.”
We can never know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat. Or even if there is something that it is like for a bat to be a bat. But if there is something, we would speculate that the bat has some kind of consciousness or sentience. That’s the argument Jackie Higgins makes in her new book Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, in which she takes us on a deep dive into the sensory experience of many different animals, from fish to owls, to moles, to cheetahs. Jackie is a television documentary director and writer. She read zoology at Oxford University as a student of Richard Dawkins and then worked for Oxford Scientific Films, where she spent a decade making wildlife films for the BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic, and The Discovery Channel. She then moved in-house at the BBC for another decade, working for their Science Department, researching, writing, directing, and producing films for many programs, from Horizon to Tomorrow’s World. Join Indre and Jackie today for their fascinating conversation regarding Jackie’s ‘joyful exploration of what it means to be human.’
