The title what is it like to be a bat? From Thomas Nagel’s essay seemed to pique my interest at first. When I think of bats I think of blindness and the saying “blind as a bat.” As I dove into the essay I immediately felt that way and I was intimidated by it. The words and the arrangement of it felt unfamiliar and confusing. I kept re-reading the essay until I finally got a vague idea of what it is the author is trying to describe.
Nagel attempts to define the idea of consciousness in his essay and argues against any reduced approach to consciousness. Reductionism was one of the terms that I had to really try and comprehend. From what I understand reductionism is an understanding that mental phenomenon can be explained by physical concepts. According to Nagel consciousness is a connection between the mind and the body and is also widespread between all organisms.
Nagel’s essay has four arguments. One of them being the experience of consciousness and what it feels like or in Nagel’s terms “The subjective character of experience.” This argument confused me a lot specifically when he wrote, “But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”(P.1) I had a “wait…what?” moment when I read that part and then I realized he is talking about what it is like to be that organism. The second argument is reflected when Nagel writes “In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. 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. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications”(P.3) He is expressing the subjective point of view and how he would not have the adequate resources to fully comprehend that point of view because they are limited.
The third point in the essay would be the feeling of being a bat. According to Nagel the knowledge of the conscious experience of a bat will never be accessible because in order to know what it is like to be a bat one must be a bat. Nagel writes, “Does it make sense to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me? We cannot genuinely understand the hypothesis that their nature is captured in a physical description unless we understand the more fundamental idea that they have an objective nature.”(P.6), which takes me to his final argument that experience is what contributes to our understanding of greater objectivity and experience will always be intricate.
Nice summary. I would say it’s a clearer explanation than Nagel gives!
Sahla,
I agree with the professor, your explanation was much clearer than the actual article. You said you didn’t understand but it seems that you have a better grasp on it than most of us. We mentioned in class that one of the things a lot of us found ourselves doing was rereading the same excerpts in order to try to understand what we just read. I really like how you broke up his ideas and I even went back to find them in the article. His most confusing argument was the definitely the first one you mentioned on “the subjective character of experience”. If I am not mistaken, this refers to the “qualia”- the subjective experience of any given perception. No two organisms will ever have the same qualia! I might be completely misreading his argument however! This was a tough read.
Brandely: You’re not confusing it. That’s exactly his point.
Sahla, I think you’ve done a very good job of concisely restating (and clarifying) the main points of Nagel’s essay. I am also interested in what your (or anyone’s) thoughts are about his final proposal. In the conclusion of his essay, Nagel calls for “a more objective understanding of the entail in its own right … An objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination” (7). How do you think we could take steps to achieving this proposal? You mention how Nagel argues that we as human beings do not have the capacity to truly feel how a bat feels because we are simply not bats. What sort of ways do you think we could overcome these barriers without resorting to what Nagel terms as “loose intermodal analogies – for example, ‘Red is like the sound of a trumpet'” (7). I’m curious as to what an objective phenomenology would look like. Of course, Nagel himself writes that this is a “speculative proposal” (6) so I’m not asking you to come up with a complete fix: just food for thought. (:
This is a really concise summary of Nagel’s ideas. Much easier to understand than the original!
I found Nagel’s second argument that you summarized as “He is expressing the subjective point of view and how he would not have the adequate resources to fully comprehend that point of view because they are limited.” the most intriguing because it really allows from an understanding of how we are relatively incapable or truly understanding another’s experience because we ourselves have not been in that same experience. Most importantly, we have not been in that specific experience as that specific person or organism.
Jayy,
Nagel’s proposal for an objective understanding of the phenomenon outside of empathy or imagination to me seems a bit impossible. The closest we can get to understand something we are not (i.e the bat) is to imagine and empathize. Even if we were to try to go into the environment of the bat and cover our eyes to complete blindness we would still be at a disadvantage simply because we lack the sense of ‘echolocation’. Bats are not blind they can see just as much as we as human beings can, it is just that at night they depend more on their ears than eyes. Also the fact that unfortunately we are not equipped with wings and the capability to fly. Maybe in a different situation or phenomenon we would be able to get closer to understanding fully but in my opinion for the case of the bat specifically we would be limited to “loose intermodal analogies”