Argument
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Overview
"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.
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." This assertion has achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution". Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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When you see a table, you not only see a coloured surface, but realize that it is hard. The addition of these elements that go beyond crude sensation is said to constitute perception. We shall have more to say about this at a later stage. For the moment, I am merely concerned to note that perception of objects is one of the most obvious examples of what is called "consciousness." We are "conscious" of anything that…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is.
So the elder Darwin, in the beginning of his _Zoonomia_, says, “The word _idea_ has various meanings in the writers of metaphysics; it is here used simply for those notions of external things which our organs of sense bring us acquainted with originally” (thus far the proposition, though vague, is unexceptionable in meaning), “and is defined a contraction, a motion, or configuration, of the fibres which constitute…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is.
Imagination has none of these functions. It only perceives the individual, the compound in that aggregate condition in which it presents itself to the senses; or it combines things which exist separately, joins some of them together, and represents them all as one body or as a force of the body. Hence it is that some imagine a man with a horse’s head, with wings, etc. This is called a fiction, a phantasm; it is a…
Moses Maimonides, The guide for the perplexed
States what What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is.
Philosophers who discussed What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Related ideas
- Subjective character of experience
- Mind–body problem
- Consciousness Explained
- Thomas Nagel
- Materialism
- Neuroscience
- Reductio ad absurdum
- Bat
- Perception
- Mind (journal)
- The Philosophical Review
- Reductionism
- Peter Hacker
- Consciousness
- Phenomenon
- Subjectivism
- Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy)
- Daniel Dennett
- Process
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.
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