What's it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
The article discusses the philosophical implications of understanding consciousness through the lens of a bat's experience. It explores the challenges of perceiving the world from a non-human perspective. The author emphasizes the limitations of human cognition in grasping the subjective experiences of other species.
- ▪The article examines the nature of consciousness and perception.
- ▪It highlights the difficulty of understanding experiences that are vastly different from our own.
- ▪The author uses the example of a bat to illustrate these philosophical challenges.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Upenn |
| Canonical URL | https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 09:57:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T10:07:58.288Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T10:08:07.703Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | fsHhMrIoaUxi |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Upenn.
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