Thomas Nagel - What is it Like to be a Bat?

For this session, we will be reading Thomas Nagel's seminal paper on consciousness: "What is it Like to Be a Bat?".

Nagel begins by challenging the idea that that materialism and physicalism can sufficiently explain the most important characteristic feature of consciousness, which is the subjective character of experience. "An organism has conscious mental states", Nagel argues, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism." It is absurd to believe that this subjective experience can be reduced to objective functional or physical states, yet it is also absurd to discard the notion of subjective experience entirely.

To explain the differences between subjective and objective concepts, Nagel gives the example of a bat. While we can imagine what it is like to be a bat based on its physical sensory apparatus, this imagined experience is not the same as the bat's subjective experience. An individual only knows what it is like to be them, and cannot achieve an objective perspective of being a different organism with it's own distinct subjective experience.

You can find a copy of the paper here