I think you’re mistaking the conclusion that the non-reductionist philosophers draw from the thought experiment. They’re not generally substance dualists like Descartes. Instead, they claim that reductionism is false because it is epistemically incomplete, even within a purely physical world: a human (or an AI, or anything other than a bat) cannot ever understand the experience of being a bat, and therefore not all knowledge reduces to mathematical patterns of physical objects.
I think you’re mistaking the conclusion that the non-reductionist philosophers draw from the thought experiment. They’re not generally substance dualists like Descartes. Instead, they claim that reductionism is false because it is epistemically incomplete, even within a purely physical world: a human (or an AI, or anything other than a bat) cannot ever understand the experience of being a bat, and therefore not all knowledge reduces to mathematical patterns of physical objects.