Feb 25, 2022
Why You Can’t Know What It’s Like for a Bat to Be a Bat with Jackie Higgins
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 Jacki…