“But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically that there is something it is like to be that organism… there is something that it is to be that organism – something it is like for the organism.” Nagel 1
I found this line to be the most confusing. it’s very wordy and repetitive, which is why I think others would find it a bit confusing to understand. He is stating in order for an organism to have consciousness, it must have something that allows it to experience this consciousness. He goes on to ask – what is it like to be it. To actually be it as in both mental and physical. The point of his essay is there are things we cannot truly experience because 1) we don’t know the answer to the mind-body problem and 2) we experience things in a subjective viewpoint while trying to understand others in an objective one (which he believes cannot capture the conscious experience at all). Using the bat example, Negal says “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task” (3) He goes on to say “Even if i could by gradual degress be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the expereince of such a future stage of myself this metamorphosed would be like.” The only we would know what it is like to be a bat would be to be born as one (but then again, would we have the same level of consciousness and curiousity as we do now?). Simply put, we cannot expereince radar vision the same as a bat unless we are a bat or maybe even Daredevil. But Daredevil wouldn’t be able to expereince the same radar as a bat because he was able to see before the red jumpsuit.
One of the things that intrigued me was when he said “At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience wihtout relying on the imaginstion – without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject.” I competely agree with him and it made me think about Higashida’s text. One of the objective fo the book was to inform people about how’s it like to be autistic and it gives a glimps. Using Negal’s article as a lens, we as readers can never understand fully Higashida’s (or othersneurodivergents) life. But Higashida uses objective expereinces to give us a taste of what he is going through. For example, Question16 asks “Is it true youhate being touched?” and Higashida explains that being touched by someone is like having them control everything about about him – “It’s as if we lose who we are.” He challenges the reader to sympathize with him, saying “Think about it – that’s terrifying.” It seems that Higashida knows we, the neurotypical, can never emphathize with him or the rest of the neurodivergent community because we will never have the same subjective expereince as they do. This is to say that their “terrifying” could be/is different from ours and we might never understand difference because we cannot expereince it. But he hopes we can at least sympathize and be more patient.
I agree that this text was a bit confusing. It took me awhile to try and grasp these ideas as well. The idea of wanting to know what it’s like to be a bat confuses me. We will never be able to know for sure what it is like to be another species because we were not born that way. I agree that higashida can be thought of in this sense that we will not be able to know what it is like to be autistic. We can only use imagination to try and feel and visualize these things but we will never be able to fully know.
I like the way you connected Nagel’s concept of not being able to understand a bat because we are limited to the resources to Higashida’s text. We would not be able to comprehend Higashida’s way of thinking or struggles because our experiences are limited. Nagel states that in order to be able to understand the bat we must be able to be a bat and experience it’s experiences, which is clearly impossible so we are limited to that resource. The same concept could apply to understanding the mind of someone with autism. I really love the connection you made here, it puts things into perspective.
Maybe we’d have been better off reading about Jacob von Uexküll’s umwelt concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umwelt
The idea is that every species perceives the world in a distinct well. Others have argued that you might talk about altered states of consciousness as distinct unwelt. I’d go so far as arguing that every individual within a species experiences a particular umwelt. That may be another way of describing neurodiversity.
Once you get past his dense diction, the ideas that Nagel states, become a bit obvious/easily understood (maybe with a bit of help from learning “neuro” language and having this class to guide our perspective). We’ll never understand what it’s like to be a bat. I feel like all that we read all stems back to phenomenology for me. The connection you made to Higashida’s text seems like a really great place to start a paper honestly and can be opened up into a larger discussion with other texts we’re going to be reading.
After reading Nagel this time around, I feel pretty confident in saying that the lasting influence in the article is almost all in the title–and in the related decision to use such an evocative comparison, between bat subjectivity and human–to make his argument about the difficulty of explain the relationship between matter (body/brain) and mind. People aren’t wrestling with the details of his argument much, but they continuously cite that main idea.
I, too, like the connection that you made between Higashida and Nagel’s texts. To recapitulate, no one can ever “truly” understand someone/some other life form’s experience, but it doesn’t mean that one can’t try to make a point of understanding or empathetic link. But I also think some might question Higashida’s use of “we” at points throughout his text. On the one hand, “we” groups autistic people in an essentialized way that gives them a voice; on the other hand, we (us readers, in this instance) know that everyone has different experiences, including those with autism. This is something that Higashida sometimes acknowledges in his answers, when he states that he can’t speak for everyone with his condition. This might beg the question if there is something “essential” about certain things (e.g., some intrinsic characteristic of being a bat, being autistic, etc.) but I (and probably Nagel, too) would argue there’s no answer to this.
So clearly I wasn’t the only one who was confused. I feel a lot better now. After reading Grace’s response and everyone else’s comments, the content is much more clearer to me. I agree with the idea of, we’ll never know what it’s like to be something other than what we are. The best we can do is learn from the species (or different type of human brain) and use our imagination and paint a picture in our mind to understand them the best way that we possibly can. I think that was part of the purpose of Higashida’s book.