Spot on! As Thomas Nagel very wisely pointed out, there seems to be a world of difference between (a) imagining what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves (which is achievable, just) and (b) attempting to imagine what it is like for a bat to be a bat (which is a different kettle of fish altogether!).
In Nagel's delightful words: "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 [and not what it is like for a bat to be a bat]."
On the other hand, Temple Grandin claims to have used her autism (which structures her perception and attention in peculiar ways) to work her way into the perspective of animals. With some success, it seems, since animal welfare has significantly improved in the farms she has visited (so she reports in her fascinating book, 'Animals in Translation'). Example: cows tend to behave very strangely around shadows, apparently. And she figured out that the reason why cows are afraid of shadows is that they use shade/light patterns to determine depth--and so they interpret a shadowed patch as a hole which they might fall into. I suppose this isn't quite imagining one's way into the head of a cow, but it does involve imagining one's way out of one's own head.
Commenting by HaloScan
