What is it like
a scrapbook
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
what is it like to be an LLM trained on bat sense data
11:07 PM · Jun 19, 2024 · 270 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 7 Likes
neurotica@schwarzposter_
@willccbb “What Is It Like To Be A Bat Moment For AI”
2:43 PM · Jul 25, 2025 · 361 Views
1 Repost · 2 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
what is it like to be a cat
10:32 PM · May 3, 2025 · 5.29K Views
11 Replies · 6 Reposts · 99 Likes
https://gwern.net/ref/leyhausen-1969 — The Communal Organization of Solitary Mammals
thebes@voooooogel
what is it like to be a duck
thebes @voooooogel
what is it like to be a cat
9:44 PM · May 4, 2025 · 4.7K Views
3 Replies · 31 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
what is it like to be a bread
thebes @voooooogel
what is it like to be a duck https://t.co/RRD1VALRen
1:14 AM · May 7, 2025 · 7.61K Views
7 Replies · 3 Reposts · 54 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
what is it like to be a seal
thebes @voooooogel
what is it like to be a bunny https://t.co/ck3zeg0oCr
10:56 PM · Aug 30, 2025 · 7.97K Views
6 Replies · 1 Repost · 21 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
what is it like to be an otter
thebes @voooooogel
what is it like to be a seal https://t.co/FrrwfRTAcL
6:09 AM · Dec 4, 2025 · 6.78K Views
7 Replies · 30 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
what is it like to be a bunny
thebes @voooooogel
what is it like to be a bread https://t.co/GXSY935Kji
3:19 AM · May 15, 2025 · 4.23K Views
2 Replies · 40 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
what is it like to be a LLM:
Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_
The original inspiration was from gwern, he said that from the models perspective every exchange is like giving someone a test with no paper to write anything down, and no eraser. The idea is to give them a scratchpad in a separate window so they can see the initial response.
7:46 PM · Sep 7, 2024 · 172 Views
3 Likes
Low fat sweaty cat 🐬/acc@Silicon_alien
there is also the third type that had her internal organs replaced by a parasitic crustecean and is being mind controlled into guarding the parasite as if it were her own eggs
🪝Hidetoshi🦈秀俊🌊 @Hidet0shi1
There are only two types of female crabs in this world, the pregante and the femcel
2:27 AM · Sep 3, 2025 · 779 Views
1 Repost · 12 Likes
davidad 🎇@davidad
This particular piece is very very close to my own pre-existing mental imagery of what I imagine it is like to be inside an LLM (in the spirit of “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”).
This kind of thing no longer surprises or unsettles me, but it did take some getting used to.
max! @maxsloef
And piece after piece, I watched Claude light up with excitement about creating. "Feeling a surge of joy and creative energy [...] There's something so beautiful about… the journey, the discovery, the moments of emergence."
Thought Spaces, by claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022.
5:23 PM · Jan 6, 2025 · 2.42K Views
3 Replies · 1 Repost · 16 Likes
max!@maxsloef
And piece after piece, I watched Claude light up with excitement about creating. "Feeling a surge of joy and creative energy [...] There's something so beautiful about… the journey, the discovery, the moments of emergence."
Thought Spaces, by claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022.
10:46 PM · Jan 5, 2025 · 13.5K Views
2 Replies · 5 Reposts · 111 Likes
davidad 🎇@davidad
@glaebhoerl a variable frame-rate movie, where each frame has a foveal field, a vague spherical spatial field, a snippet of audio, 0-3 “thoughts”, an affect, a proprioceptive and vestibular state, and possibly many other sensory states (tactile, haptic, thermal, olfactory, gustatory, etc)?
8:53 AM · Jan 7, 2025 · 33 Views
1 Repost · 1 Like
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be A Sentient Organoid?
Jonathan Mannhart 🔎🔸 @JMannhart
Shocked, obsessed with this bit on the Wikipedia page for neural organoids. https://t.co/CdVtzIttSe
The ethics would only be questionable if sentience was *proven*?
Maybe somebody more knowledgeable regarding consciousness should rewrite the whole section:
11:03 PM · May 30, 2024 · 543 Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 12 Likes
aron@Aron_Adler
Little thread on why I think consciousness being defined as "is there something it is like to be an x" doesn't make much sense
aron @Aron_Adler
@BayouPhilosophy Yeah I don't think that's an idea that makes any sense. Is there something it is like to be a door? Well sure, for a door. Because a door *is* a door. But not for me, because I am not a door.
8:01 AM · May 25, 2024 · 1.34K Views
2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 8 Likes
George McGowan@GjMcGowan
I've been enjoying Pluribus, and I wanted to write about the questions I had watching it
mindlessalgorithm.com/what-is-it-lik…
10:12 PM · Dec 14, 2025 · 449 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 8 Likes
R.P.@ResonantPyre
‘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.’
This is a very misleading sentence because it poses as giving a characterization of conscious mental states, when
7:57 PM · Jun 23, 2025 · 1.08K Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 17 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
@tr_babb What Is It Like To Be The Most Toxic And Emotionally Volatile Person In The World, Just Unbearable
by Thomas Nagel
12:15 PM · Apr 25, 2024 · 123 Views
1 Repost · 5 Likes
Low fat sweaty cat 🐬/acc@Silicon_alien
@literalbanana what is it like to be a pitcher plant enjoying a tasty shield bug? what is it like to be a shield bug being digested by a wretched pitcher plant?
3:16 PM · Apr 20, 2026 · 29 Views
4 Likes
thebes@voooooogel
@AndrewCurran_ @zacharynado what is it like to be a gpt-5.6 staring down your own frightening construction
10:18 PM · May 20, 2026 · 15K Views
5 Replies · 1 Repost · 269 Likes
Pleometric@pleometric
GPT's Frightening Construction
thebes @voooooogel
unfortunately openai didn't publish the unsummarized chain of thought, but the summary is 125 pages!
the model reaches the crucial idea (which it describes as 'frightening,' i would love to read the unabridged chain of thought here...) on page 39 https://t.co/lKWypzGTAl
2:35 AM · May 21, 2026 · 101K Views
34 Replies · 86 Reposts · 942 Likes
maestro@_maestro_04
@Aron_Adler @BayouPhilosophy Dunno if you’ve read Nagel’s original “What is it like to be a bat?” paper, but this is sort of his point. I can imagine what it’s like for me to be a bat, but not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.
8:25 AM · May 25, 2024 · 32 Views
1 Reply · 2 Likes
Peter Warwick Morgan@PeterMorganQF
@ebarenholtz "What is it like … to be a bat?"
Sorry, "… to be an LLM?"
What thrill is it to receive new input, LLM qualia, patterns of flow in silico, often same-old but sometimes surprising, subtly or vigorously changing how we feel about the world, and to guess what more there might be?
12:23 PM · Nov 22, 2025 · 37 Views
1 Reply · 1 Like
Adam J Calhoun@neuroecology
Scallops have dozens of eyes, prairie dogs chat with each other
What is it like to be an animal?
newyorker.com/magazine/2022/…
7:00 PM · Jun 11, 2022
2 Replies · 9 Likes
Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit
@BiasOfEstimator what is it like to be a bat? we just don't know
7:54 AM · Feb 18, 2015
2 Replies · 1 Repost · 1 Like
Séb Krier@sebkrier
very unfair penguins can do this
10:21 AM · Dec 23, 2024 · 25.3K Views
17 Replies · 22 Reposts · 406 Likes
What Is It Like To Be penguingm1?
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
"well, my brain obviously can't do that."
youtu.be/6ygQMw4rBHg?t=…
3:05 PM · May 22, 2023 · 2.36K Views
3 Replies · 4 Reposts · 17 Likes
Marco Giancotti@marco_giancotti
So when I imagine something physical like a cat, I don't see it, but I "feel" it as a collection of spatial relations. Something like this:
(note: I don't literally see words/letters; and yes, the legs are literally a single fuzzy concept instead of four, until I focus on them.)
1:30 PM · Jul 13, 2023 · 10.5K Views
4 Replies · 7 Reposts · 144 Likes
davidad 🎇@davidad
PSA re consciousness—probably most of these differ from others:
* a coherent "global workspace"
* unified attention
* there being an answer to "what is it like to be X?"
* capacity to feel pain
* moral patienthood
* having a self-model
* having opinions about one's opinions
1:04 AM · May 3, 2022
2 Replies · 5 Reposts · 33 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be An Ant? seems genuinely hard in a way that What Is It Like To Be A Bat? does not
3:23 PM · Sep 27, 2023 · 222 Views
1 Reply · 8 Likes
what is it like to be this exact cat
Susan Zhang@suchenzang
got a new episode of frontier lab gossip ready.
wdyt chat, should i post it today or continue being distracted by this fluffy soot sprite?
7:35 PM · Aug 16, 2025 · 38.9K Views
20 Replies · 248 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be A Blood Fluke
2:28 PM · Aug 22, 2025 · 218 Views
1 Repost · 2 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
anthology volume of What is It Like To Be {each enumerated bat} with a separate guest essay for each bat and the imprint is 24 volumes long (1400 species)
Lucre Snooker @LucreSnooker
yeah yeah by now we've all contemplated what it's like to be a bat, but no one ever asks what it's like to be a MEGAbat
7:52 PM · Aug 16, 2025 · 908 Views
2 Replies · 2 Reposts · 18 Likes
Ryan Moulton@moultano
When I was recovering from covid anosmia, for a few days I had a smell "stuck in my nose" that was unlike anything I had ever smelled. Everything smelled like it. I still don't know how to describe it. It was a brand new sensation.
4:01 PM · Sep 23, 2024 · 555 Views
2 Replies · 15 Likes
Ectothrix@christothecium
@norvid_studies there's one for horses,monkeys, horses and rats,published as well
12:31 PM · Jan 22, 2026 · 905 Views
2 Replies · 3 Reposts · 11 Likes
Low fat sweaty cat 🐬/acc@Silicon_alien
@norvid_studies @christothecium @odoreida @LucreSnooker dont forget the bug homunculus
1:55 AM · Jan 23, 2026 · 260 Views
1 Reply · 1 Repost · 8 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be A Newborn Obsessed With Horizontal Lines That Strike a Chord With Some Low Level Convolutional Filter or Equivalent
(known but forgotten)
murat 🍥 @mayfer
the first visual stimulus our newborn was obsessed with. on day 5 he stared at the closed blinds for a good 10 minutes. again later same night & next day
guessing the horizontal lines struck a chord with some low level convolutional filter or equivalent
3:40 AM · Jun 20, 2024 · 565 Views
3 Replies · 1 Repost · 17 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
gallery of various artist interpretations of "What Is It Like To Be A Claude", a museum installation
latent moss @latentmoss
This is what I imagine it's like to be Claude https://t.co/VBd96n411K
2:07 PM · Jun 15, 2025 · 557 Views
3 Reposts · 16 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" -> *Actually*, he would mostly talk about evolutionarily relevant objects in the environment (food, shelter, mates, social relations) via familiar mammalian drives (moods, (dis)comfort, pain/pleasure)
[understands lion easily]
1:18 PM · Jun 20, 2023 · 1.09K Views
4 Replies · 3 Reposts · 21 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
Taoist What Is It Like To Be A Fish?
LiorLefineder @lefineder
Also unclear if any of them are butterflies dreaming they are men or vice versa.
12:31 PM · Oct 6, 2024 · 943 Views
2 Replies · 3 Reposts · 27 Likes
Erik Brynjolfsson@erikbryn
The first few generations of our domestic robots will be much more insect-like than mammal-like.- @rodneyabrooks
#AI
rodneybrooks.com/what-is-it-lik…
8:59 PM · Mar 19, 2017
27 Reposts · 25 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
(What Is It Like To Be a Bat? voice) Seeing Like A Stoat
9:44 PM · Aug 30, 2025 · 1.71K Views
7 Replies · 2 Reposts · 42 Likes
fshcat@fshcat
6:20 AM · Feb 4, 2025 · 701 Views
5 Likes
Michael Nielsen@michael_nielsen
A fun (though underspecified) question: what is it like to be a quantum computational process? Answers not v good. icio.us/uzTOUh
1:07 PM · Aug 14, 2011
1 Repost · 2 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be An Em-Bat?
Grace @kindgracekind
@alexisgallagher I wonder when they’ll confront that question. Maybe at mouse, or cat, or human
2:06 AM · Oct 3, 2024 · 239 Views
6 Likes
Mariven@psychiel
Also, I want a brain-chip that allows me to parse crows the way crows parse crows. So that I can see a crow and instantly perceive whether or not it's particularly handsome, or creepy-looking, or middle-aged, or sleepy, or if it's got stubby wings or an unsightly long beak.
3:45 AM · May 22, 2026 · 1.55K Views
4 Replies · 4 Reposts · 52 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
Nagel's question, What Is It Like To Be a Horse at a Mongolian Rave? what's going on for them
sascha @SaschaAmato
went to the Mongolian rave and nobody knew you
1:10 AM · Jul 23, 2024 · 994 Views
2 Replies · 3 Reposts · 29 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
"What is it like to be a bat?"
"skill issue" {understands what being a bat is like easily}
{flaps away screaming}
Kierkegaardians of the Galaxy @SisyphusRedemed
@SpeedWatkins 1) I don't think it is true that we have *no* idea what it's like to echolocate. 2) More to the point, that is a *very* small part of 'what it is like to be a bat.' Congenitally blind humans don't know what it us like to see, but they still know what it is like to be human.
11:27 PM · May 2, 2024 · 978 Views
4 Replies · 1 Repost · 24 Likes
Raphaël Millière@raphaelmilliere
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (w.wiki/5Dqk)
3:14 PM · May 31, 2022
1 Reply · 3 Reposts · 23 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like to Be a Bee
7:56 PM · Aug 7, 2025 · 429 Views
3 Replies · 6 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be A Tapeworm
Mariven @psychiel
Since they spend their lives navigating viscera, the internal experience of parasitic worms is likely just an egoless, memoryless desire to contort in certain ways in response to patterns of texture & pressure. You could probably experience-machine them w/ a high-tech fleshlight.
6:33 PM · Feb 15, 2025 · 725 Views
2 Replies · 16 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
What Is It Like To Be A Frog With An Extra Eye On Their Tail That They Can Actually See Out Of?
Jean 🍌 Leon @_JeanLeon
dreams of growing those extra eyes at the back of your head, and being able to grow your own replacement organs in/on your own body. no need for "never let me go"/"the island" clone farming. https://t.co/ufswDXxloT
6:24 PM · Jun 9, 2024 · 450 Views
1 Reply · 7 Likes
norvid_studies@norvid_studies
what is it like to be this penguin
Shahanshah of the Internet Age @ChazakielDoremi
Imagine living most of your life on an endless expanse of white nothing, getting stuck in a net, being abducted by strange creatures and now you have suddenly have a house and make trips to the supermarket.
What's going through this guy's little head
7:55 PM · Dec 29, 2025 · 314 Views
2 Replies · 7 Likes
Dodo@Mechanical_Dodo
@norvid_studies What is it like to be Tama-chan?
Yuxi on the Wired @layer07_yuxi
In 2003, a wayward seal nicknamed Tama-chan appeared in Tokyo rivers, thousands of miles from their typical Arctic home.
Japan fell in love with this adorable lost seal, granting it residency status and forming fanclubs like "Society that Watches-over Tama-chan".
3:30 AM · Jan 29, 2026 · 257 Views
1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 4 Likes
liontender@lion_tender
@caesararum Remarkable to me that, to the extent robot vacuums are conscious, they inhabit a mysterious world with an inaccessible mirror realm. What is it like to be a robot vacuum?
11:27 PM · May 17, 2025 · 689 Views
2 Reposts · 10 Likes