Lecture
A bat is an excellent example for reflecting on the subjectivity of experience, since it possesses sense organs whose sensory perception is, in principle, inaccessible to us as human beings.
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (or, "What is it like to be a bat?") (English "What is it like to be a bat?") — an article by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, published in 1974 in the journal "Philosophical Review" and which became a classic in the study of consciousness. In this article Thomas Nagel put forward a critique of physicalist reductionism, which at the time was the dominant approach in science and analytic philosophy to solving the mind–body problem. According to Nagel, a being can be said to have consciousness only when there is "something it is like" to be that being — that is, when the world is perceived from that being's own subjective point of view . Any attempt to identify mental phenomena with physical processes in the brain proves unsuccessful because of the subjective character of consciousness, which, in Nagel's view, is the very essence of consciousness. Therefore no human being can imagine what it is like to be a bat, which perceives the surrounding world — alongside the senses it shares with humans — also by means of an echolocation organ that humans lack. Science, meanwhile, operates exclusively with objective facts that do not depend on the observer or his subjective experience. Philosophers who insist that the nature of consciousness cannot be grasped by scientific methods have used this article by Nagel as a kind of manifesto for their views .
This thought experiment was proposed in 1974 by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, in the article of the same name. In that article the philosopher criticized the approach that was then dominant for defining consciousness and for delineating the scope — and, accordingly, the methods — of its investigation. In effect, it was shown for the first time that the subjective experience underlying consciousness cannot be examined objectively. A human being can never know what it is like to be a bat (nor, for that matter, another human being, though of course we can make guesses about that). The perception of external stimuli defines this very subjective experience in a purely subjective way, giving no way to study it from a third-person, that is, objective, standpoint. And so far there is no method for overcoming this. Thought experiments of this kind are, however, one such method — though a very unreliable one.
For a subtler grasp of how difficult it is to work with things like this, you can try a simpler version of the experiment yourself. Reflecting on your own is good, but without proper preparation it will not get you anywhere. As practice, though, try explaining to your partner what it means to experience an orgasm. Do not explain it in physiological terms — muscle contractions and the like. Explain your inner subjective experience. But first understand that words like «voluptuousness», «elation», «soaring to the heavens» and the like are just words — a husk meant to solve this problem but which only obscures it further. Remember the beetle in the box?
If you are a woman explaining your inner experience to a man, you face the hardest task of all. But the other combinations are only a little easier. After every attempt you will realize that, even with a channel of communication and a developed symbolic system in place, explaining this is practically impossible. And what about dolphins, bats, ants and other such creatures, with which we have, in principle, no channel of interaction at all?
In his article, Thomas Nagel posed the question that has become the most famous in the modern science of consciousness: what is it like to be a bat? He noted that none of the theories of consciousness popular at the time was able to answer this question. It may therefore turn out that even if science one day manages to describe fully and precisely the behavior of bats, their physiology, anatomy, neurobiology, and the cognitive processes in their brains, this will not help us gain any understanding of what it is like to be a bat. The answer to this question cannot be obtained from a third-person perspective; it can only be obtained by identifying oneself with the bat. Nagel proposed three variants of thought experiments.
As a result of this reasoning, Nagel concluded that science would, in all likelihood, never be able to answer the question he had posed .
Nagel's article was directed against materialism on account of its epistemological limitations, although Nagel did not thereby refute materialist metaphysics itself. Many materialist philosophers criticized Nagel's position, putting forward a number of arguments in their own defense. Nevertheless, the debate over Nagel's article continues to this day among both philosophers and scientists, some of whom support his position while others – criticize it .
In contemporary philosophy of mind it is widely accepted that Thomas Nagel's formulation — according to which consciousness means there being something it is like to be something — captures the essence of consciousness very precisely, even though no generally accepted definition of consciousness yet exists .
Antti Revonsuo noted that Nagel's article has played the single most important role in the modern history of consciousness studies . At the same time, he pointed out that some philosophers and many neuroscientists hold more optimistic forecasts about the prospects for scientific research into consciousness. They argue their position by noting that future breakthroughs in science cannot be predicted, and that what present-day philosophers consider impossible may therefore become real in the future. The history of science shows that neither philosophers nor scientists were able to predict the advent of relativity theory, of quantum mechanics, or of genetics. In just the same way, the neuroscience of the distant future may prove just as fantastical to people today as modern genetics and molecular biology would have seemed to nineteenth-century biologists .
The American philosopher Daniel Dennett rejects Nagel's claim that a bat's consciousness is inaccessible, arguing that any «interesting or theoretically important» features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation.[10] For example, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away, because echolocation has a limited range. He believes that any such analogous aspects of its experience could be gleaned through further scientific experiments.
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