| Blesser, B., & Salter, L.-R. (2007). Spaces speak, are you listening? Experiencing aural architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. |
 
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| "bats in the Amazon valley shifted their vocalization from the more typical 100,000 Hz region to 8,000 Hz because the high humidity of the tropical rain forests rapidly attenuates ultrasonic signals (Griffin, 1971). Male short-tailed crickets can increase the area of their calling song by a factor of 14 by perching in treetops instead of on the ground (Paul and Walker, 1979). Fish take can take advantage of the highfrequency cutoff of shallow water to avoid detection by predators but still maintain communication with their conspecifics (Forrest, Miller, and Zagar, 1993). As these examples clearly illustrate, animals are more than merely aware of their particular acoustic environment. They use that awareness to evolve more useful communication strategies within a shared competitive auditory channel."
Griffin, D. (1971). The importance of atmospheric attenuation for the echolocation of bats (Chiroptera).
Animal Behavior 19: 55–61.
Paul, R., and Walker, T. (1979). Arboreal singing in a burrowing cricket, Anurogryllus arboreus. Jour-
nal of Comparative Physiology 132: 217–223.
Forrest, T., Miller, G., and Zagar, J. (1993). Sound propagation in shallow water: Implications for
acoustics communications by aquatic animals. Bioacoustics: The International Journal of Animal
Sound and Its Recording 4: 259–270. |
| Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. |
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| "I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species)." |
| "Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, 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 surrounding 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 resources are inadequate to the task" |
| "The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It would be fine if someone were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature. And to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance." |
| "My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts [...] But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted forever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type." |
| Footnote 10 has this: "[W]hen I look at the "Mona Lisa," my visual experience has a certain quality, no trace of which is to be found by someone looking into my brain." |
| "the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true" |
| "it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it." |
| von Uexküll, J. (1992). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. Semiotica, 89(4), 319–391. |
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| "According to information I have received concerning the sound perception of night moths, it makes no difference whether the sound to which the animals are adjusted be the sound manifestation of a bat or one produced by rubbing a glass stopper — the effect is always the same. Night moths which, owing to their light coloring, are easily visible, fly away upon perceiving a high tone, while species which have protective coloration alight in response to the same tone. The same sensory cue has the opposite effect in their case. It is striking how the two opposite kinds of action are governed by a plan. There can be no question of discrimination or purposiveness, since no moth or butterfly has ever seen the color of its own skin. The plan revealed in this instance appears even more admirable when we learn that the artful microscopic structure of the night moth's hearing organ exists solely for this one high tone of the bat. To all else, these moths are totally deaf." |
