Granted that you can't imagine what it would be like to be a bat, can you imagine what it is like to be a human? Could you put it into words, explain it to a martian, or to an intelligent bat, for that matter? You might point to some salient phenomena: time and contingency and knowledge of death, expectations of pain and pleasure, desire and fear, but do you know if the attitude you take to any of these are essential or merely prejudices of your culture? What brings these to mind rather than something else, social emotions, love, longing, grief, compassion, envy etc., etc? For many it would seem that what they identify as most chracteristically human depends on their ideological loyalties. You might suggest that your questioner read certain novels or poems, since it is from these that you have gained your own deepest intimations of the human condition, but don't all of these already take a human constitution in their readers for granted, and even a culturally specific one? Do you fully understand a novel translated from Russian or Japanese given that you did not grow up in these cultures, or with this racial inheritance? To respond adequately to the martian or the bat you would need to know pretty well what their implicit understandings were and hence already understand what it is like to be one of these. Can you imagine what it is like to be Finnish or Chinese well enough so that you could make what it feels like to be you intelligible to some one born there? Can you explain to an oenophile how wine tastes to you who are not one, or what you experience when you taste a certain vintage? To say nothing of the chasm that separates the sexes!a All of this points to radical untranslatability. Once you look at it closely it appears that there is no such thing as what it feels like to be or to experience any X, but rather that 'what it feels like' is a movable token in certain over-determined language games. But on the other hand part of the constitution of any experience is an implicit reference to human experience in full generality, the sensus communis; this is unknown, and perhaps unknowable, yet an essential part of the horizon of whatever it is you call experience.