What Is It Like To Be A Bat? — Nagel

Notes from Thomas Nagel’s Essay On Consciousness

Background

• This article was written in the 1970s and has become a very famous article on the topic of philosophy of the mind.
• In this article, Nagel launches an attack on physicalism as an adequate explanation for the mind-body problem making the claim that most theories fail to explain one of the most important parts of the problem; the fact of conscious experience.

Attack on Reductionism

PRE: Nagel begins by explaining how reductionist theories of the mind-body problem fails to explain conscious mental phenomena. Saying reductionist theories merely put what is ‘incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different’

ANA: Nagel shines a light on how reductionists use different examples like water-H20, lightning-electrical discharge. and gene-DNA to draw out similarities between those reductionist theories and the mind-body problem.

CON: Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain consciousness, therefore they aren’t helpful.

Defining Conscious Experience

PRE: Nagel defines conscious experience as ‘something it is like to be that organism’

• There may be implications about the form of experience or behavior but at its core, conscious mental states mean there is something to ‘be’ that organism, something it is like for the organism.

Synonyms: qualia, subjective experience, conscious experience, phenomenological features

Why Reductionist Theories Ignore Consciousness?

1. Reductive theories of the mind seem to work perfectly fine without explaining consciousness
2. Explaining states of being through function or intent doesn’t explain consciousness either as it can be also prescribed to robots or automatons that do not experience anything. (though he does admit that something complex like us may require experiences, but analyzing the concept of experience will not tell us why this is the case)
3. Same with the causal role of experience to behavior because they deny conscious-awareness OR they deny experience — either a person is aware of the experience they are having OR they lack consciousness and, by extension, a mind.

He does not deny that there is a causal relationship between experience and behavior nor that they have functional properties but only that subjective experience is not fully explained.

Nature of Reductionist Programs

PRE: A reductionist program must strike at the core of what is being reduced (in this case subjective experience as material stuff)

• If material analysis leaves out the facts of subjective experience ( what is being reduced ) then the theory is incomplete)
• A defense of materialism ob the bases of mental phenomena that does directly deal with consciousness is a poor theory
• As it is silly to expect that theories that don't try to explain consciousness can be extended to include subjective experience.

CON: The phenological experience must be explained in reductionist theories for theories to be complete.

Relationship Between Subjective — Objective

Pour-soi: For itself — this is conscious and aware of itself as a thinker. Things that are for-themselves are conscious beings. A person is pour-soi because she is conscious and aware of herself as a thinking thing.

En-soi: In itself — this is concrete and unaware. Things that are in-themselves are objects within the world. A chair is en-soi because it simply is what it is

PRE: To have an objective account of something (en-soi) we inadvertently remove the subjective properties (pour-soi) in our explanation

• eg: to explain water as h20, we leave the explanation of water as blue or the feeling of touching it (explaining the subjective experience as something that occurs as a result of the subject).

Analogy Of The Bat

ARG: Nagel uses the analogy of a bat to pose the idea of phenomenological facts that are only privy to that specific point of view. The idea that there are knowable-unknowns subjective facts that are can only be accessed for that subject.

ANA: The conscious experience of a bat is precisely what it is like to be the bat. A bat has completely different sensory apparatuses to humans, using sonar or echolocation to sense the world around them. In our case, humans mostly use vision to sense the world around them.

CON: Comparing our subjective experience to that of a bat is an impossible task based on these premises. Imagining what it would be like to echolocate or fly like a bat is merely imagining what it would be like for a human to act like a bat, not actually be a bat as our sensory apparatuses are so different where extrapolating from our senses would be inaccurate.

ANA (Me): This is the same as trying to explain the fact of what it is like to see the color blue to someone who is colorblind, or blind. There is no clear possibility for a blind person to extrapolate what it would be like to see blind or someone to imagine what it is like to be blind as the sensory apparatuses are so different.

CON: Us imagining what it is like to be a bat, would probably be nothing like what it would actually be to be a bat. But still, it seems bats do have experiences.

• The subjective character of what it is like to be something other than what we are is seemingly incompletable, as Nagel puts it.

We As The Bat

ARG: For those who are skeptical Nagel asks them to imagine a bat denying that it would be such an experience to being human. As we distinctly know what it is like to be human with preciseness, and even if the bat can’t conceive of it, there is still an exactness to our experiences that we can say exist but that another organism cannot imagine or extrapolate.

CON: The limits of our nature denies us from knowing these phenomenological facts.

Limitations of Human Language

PRE: Considering the experience of a bat there are phenomenological facts not privy to us.

PRE: Denying these facts exists would also seem to deny other objective facts that seem to be present before being discovered like numbers, etc…

ARG: Our human experience and systems of understanding stop us from explaining what it could be like to be a bat because the systems are so different.

ARG: Nagel is not saying that we cannot describe phenomenological facts only that, but it is most accurate to do so when the systems of experience and understanding of the other person are sufficiently similar to our own.

• That point of viewing us not only accessible to one person but that it is a type. And that those closer matched to our type will be better able to extrapolate our explanation of these facts.

Effects on the Mind-Body Problem

ARG: Nagel proposes that if what it is like for an organism can only be known from that point of view, then how would it be possible that the characteristics of that experience be expressed in the physical operations of that thing.

The Nature Of Objective Observation

ARG: Nagel states that objective observation is true for multiple points of view and different perceptual systems. And that even though our experience of things have subjective facts to them, the things in themselves can be studied because they have an existence external to our viewpoint.

ANA: A Martian can understand lightning objectively, but not our visual subjective experience of lightning. They can be understood visually from us. but also by other points of view as they are external to us.

ARG: Nagel wishes to be non-committal about the existence of an endpoint to the completely objective intrinsic nature of things, thinking objectivity as a direction in which understanding can travel (i.e as far as possible away from the human viewpoint).

GOAL: His goal is to highlight that physicalist who hope to undermine the seemingly non-scientific nature of personal experience, by explaining subjective phenomena in their objective form, have still tried to sideline or remove something that is tangibly there.

Why this does not satisfy Physicalism

ANA: A Martian can view lightning much like we do — not as we do, but as we do, with its eyes or sensors or whatever sensory system it uses. But the physicalist claims that perceptions are brain states which would imply that a Martian should be able to look into our brain and see brain states when we experience lightning.

TLDR by Nagel

The whole attack on physicalism can be summarised with this quote.

If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehenisble from one point of view, then a shift to greater objectivity — that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint — does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us further away from it.

Nagel’s Conclusion

Ultimately Nagel does not think physicalism is wrong. Just that the conflation that brain processes are sensations are sidestepping the question of consciousness because we don't know how they ‘are’ the same.

ANA: Nagel makes the claim when saying X is Y, and that we know what X means and we know what Y means, ‘is’ calls upon how they relate to each other (and that we have a rough idea of how they are may the same)

• ie. lightning is an electrical discharge because when we see what is usually deemed as lightning, the events that cause lightning is also similar to what we use would describe the of cause electrical discharge.
• However, we have no idea how consciousness relates to brain states as they are so different.

Butterfly Analogy

ANA: Nagel gives an analogy of how we could know something is true without knowing how it is so.

• for ie. if we were to lock a caterpillar in a locked box and witness a butterfly fly out (without anything else going in)
• We know the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same but no idea how this might be so.
• This is the same as saying sensations are merely brain states.

Nagel’s Conclusion (cont.)

Nagel concludes that the first step in developing a fuller theory of the mind-body problem is understanding the general problem of subjective and objective and that a better theory can be reached if we had a more objective method of explaining the subjective experience to something with a different point of view

• or even what it would mean to explain subjective experience objectively
• ie. explaining the experience of red in objective terms.

This will help us close the relation between consciousness and physicalism, hopefully bringing a fuller understanding of the mind-body problem instead of simply sidestepping the problem of consciousness,