Phenomenology Series (Sess 7) Nagel: What is it like to be a Bat?

This is our seventh Meetup in a series focused on Phenomenology.

Thomas Nagel (1937- present) is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he taught from 1980 until his retirement in 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are political philosophy, ethics and philosophy of mind. He is the seventh philosopher in our series on phenomenology. Over the past six months we have primarily focused on the idea of phenomenal experience and its role in consciousness or pour-soi (being-for-itself). Here, we will be again discussing consciousness and, in particular, the inability (or ability, depending on your leanings) of physicalism to explain consciousness.

Nagel wrote a rather famous essay in 1974 called What is it like to be Bat?, which we will be discussing in this meetup. In this work the “what it is like” criterion aims to capture a subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-location senses, even though we humans from our human point of view cannot empathetically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view. Species experience the phenomenal world differently. For example, bees use different wavelengths of light to sense flowers and dogs have a greatly enhanced sense of smell, which give these species a anomalous subjective view on the physical world. And, of course, Nagel’s argument extends to the individual subjective experiences that each of us have, which form our consciousness that has linkages to some works that we read by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others over the last few months.

What is it Like to be a Bat? is a short read – only 17-30 pages depending on page size and is available both on the web and for purchase in a book form by Oxford University Press. I expect this discussion be lively and pull in ideas from many other thinkers, given its focus on consciousness, physicalism, and the mind-body problem. This meetup will undoubtedly provide some lively discussion.

Hope to see you at the session.