Mortal Questions: What is it like to be a bat?

Introduction: Thomas Nagel was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1937. He came to the United States in 1939 and became a naturalized citizen five years later. After completing his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1958, he studied at Oxford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1960. Nagel then enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1963. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley until 1966 and at Princeton University for the next fourteen years. In 1980 he accepted an appointment as Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He was named Professor of Philosophy and Law in 1986, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Law in 2001, and University Professor in 2002. Nagel has held visiting appointments at Rockefeller University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Mexico, the University of Witwatersrand (Republic of South Africa), the University of California at Los Angeles, and All Souls College at Oxford University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College at Oxford University. Nagel’s publications include The Possibility of Altruism (1970), Mortal Questions (1979; translated into 10 languages), The View from Nowhere (1986), What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987; translated into 20 languages), Equality and Partiality (1991), The Last Word (1997), and Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (2002). Our reading is Nagel’s 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” which examines the reductionist theory that some contemporary philosophers propose as a solution to “the mindbody problem”—the problem of how the mind and body are related. Reductionism is the view that one kind of thing can be “reduced to” (explained fully in terms of) another kind of thing. With respect to the mind-body problem, reductionism holds that the mind and mental phenomena can be reduced to physical phenomena, such as neurological activity of the brain (hence the doctrine is known as physicalism or materialism). Nagel contends that the major difficulty facing reductionist, physicalist theories of mind is the phenomenon of consciousness. While there may be some way to reduce consciousness to physical states, we are far from knowing how this might be done. Nagel explains that the fact that an organism (human or nonhuman) has consciousness means that “there is something it is like to be that organism—something it is like for that organism.” Consciousness is by nature a subjective phenomenon, and as such seems impossible to analyze exhaustively in terms of objective, physical phenomena. Subjectivity implies a single point of view, while objectivity requires a more universal point of view. Taking the example of a bat as a creature very different from us, Nagel argues that it seems impossible for us to capture in objective analysis the subjective experience of a bat. I might imagine what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves (hanging upside down by my feet, for example), but I seem unable to know what is it like for the bat to be [a ] bat. Even if I had complete knowledge of the working of the bat’s neurological system, how could the subjective experience of the bat be reduced to this kind of objective analysis? Nagel points out that he does not claim to have disproved the physicalist claim that mental states are states of the body; he simply claims that the two terms of this alleged equation are so different that we have no idea what it means to say that a mental state “is” a physical state. —Donald Abel