Search results
time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life. I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have expe-rience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise)
- 4MB
- 17
"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).
Mar 21, 2024 · This book is a fiftieth anniversary republication of Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” a classic in the philosophy of mind. Through its argument for the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, it played an essential role in making the study of consciousness a central part of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
Sep 20, 2010 · Perhaps a bat’s qualia during echolocation looks like human qualia when we see things. Or maybe it has a shape more like that of hearing.
In “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” he delves into the topics of consciousness, subjective experience, the problem of other minds, and the limitations of physicalist theories of mind. The essay has shaped ongoing debates in philosophy of mind and consciousness studies.
The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like. So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable. We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like.
Thomas Nagel argues that there are facts about conscious experience that are subjective and can only be known from that subjective perspective. Even if we know all the objective facts about bats, we may not actually know what it would really be like to be a bat.
