What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Summary

1974 philosophy paper by Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat". "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.[1] Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."[2] This assertion has achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution".[3] Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness".[4]: 441 Nagel argues you cannot compare human consciousness to that of a bat. The paper's author, Thomas Nagel Nagel challenges the possibility of explaining "the most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena" by reductive materialism (the philosophical position that all statements about the mind and mental states can be translated, without any loss or change in meaning, into statements about the physical). For example, a reductive physicalist's solution to the mind–body problem holds that whatever "consciousness" is, it can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body.[5] Nagel begins by assuming that "conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon" present in many animals...