I'm pretty sure we could study a bat's brain, if it hasn't already been done, and get a good idea of what echolocation would feel like.
Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scanning or up to 200 per second when locked onto a target.
How similar the perceptual "feel" of echolocation is to vision would seem to largely depend on whether a bat's echolocation sense has the equivalent of persistence of vision and a 2-D cortical map which combine to give us the "spatial, always-on" feel of vision. These are both things that could be determined by studying a bat's brain. If it has these then I'd expect that in 5-20 chirps per second scanning mode the bat would experience something like looking at a submarines sonar screen, while switching to 200 chirps per second "radar lock" mode would increase the resolution and update rate of that display, with the periphery perhaps fading away due to not being updated.
Of course a bat doesn't necessarily have "persistence of echo" and a 2-D cortical map of echo space, in which case we could reason about what the quale of the sense would be like in that case (a bit more like hearing perhaps), but given the speed and accuracy of sensing it needs to catch fast moving insects, I'd expect that it does have these to better allow it's brain to predict prey trajectories and intercept points.
This misses the point of the discussion. Yes, we can understand what it is like to be a human with echolocation. However, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat.
Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scanning or up to 200 per second when locked onto a target.
How similar the perceptual "feel" of echolocation is to vision would seem to largely depend on whether a bat's echolocation sense has the equivalent of persistence of vision and a 2-D cortical map which combine to give us the "spatial, always-on" feel of vision. These are both things that could be determined by studying a bat's brain. If it has these then I'd expect that in 5-20 chirps per second scanning mode the bat would experience something like looking at a submarines sonar screen, while switching to 200 chirps per second "radar lock" mode would increase the resolution and update rate of that display, with the periphery perhaps fading away due to not being updated.
Of course a bat doesn't necessarily have "persistence of echo" and a 2-D cortical map of echo space, in which case we could reason about what the quale of the sense would be like in that case (a bit more like hearing perhaps), but given the speed and accuracy of sensing it needs to catch fast moving insects, I'd expect that it does have these to better allow it's brain to predict prey trajectories and intercept points.