Why Bats Shouldn’t Exist: The Limits of Knowledge, the Pitfalls of Prediction, and the Triumph of the Possible Over the Probable

Most of us have been taught that life is fragile, its existence always at risk, but this is a parochial error stemming from, ironically enough, an excessively anthropocentric worldview.

‘What is it like to be a bat?’ is a famous question asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. (More precisely, what would it be like for a person to have the echo-location senses of a bat?) Perhaps the full answer is that in future it will be not so much the task of philosophy to discover what that is like, but the task of technological art to give us