Posted: October 6th, 2022

What Is It Like to Be a Bat

In his essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat, Thomas Nagel argues that regardless of the validity of physicalism, it is still impossible for humans to understand how physicalism could be true in that a complete physical description of consciousness is not possible. Nagel claims that the explanatory gap is unbridgeable since consciousness is necessarily subject to a particular point of view and any attempt to objectively understand consciousness is therefore rendered incomplete.
Nagel posits, first, that consciousness is not a strictly human phenomenon. Rather, there are other organisms which experience consciousness. From their consciousness, and their consciousness alone, Nagel concludes that there is what it is like to be that organism. Nagel calls “what it is like to be that organism” the subjective character of experience. For Nagel, the reductionists must describe the subjective character of experience to a physical phenomenon, since, if base properties and all subsequently determined properties can be described in terms of physical properties then their resultant mental properties (consciousness) should be describable in terms of physical properties. However, for Nagel, this is the most difficult task of the physicalists since “every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.” (437)
To demonstrate the relationship between subjectivity and point of view, Nagel uses the experience of a bat. Bats use echolocation in order to perceive certain characteristics of real things (their size, motion, distance from the bat, etc.). While humans are also able to perceive these characteristics, due to the difference in sensory modalities, the way in which we do would be radically different from the way bats perceive these characteristics of reality. Nagel explains that even the limited ability to imagine oneself as a bat would merely constitute imagining oneself behaving like a bat and would not constitute any understanding of what it would be like to be a bat. Further, lacking the same sensory modalities as bats we do not have the correct experiential terms for describing what it would be like to be a bat. Nagel holds himself only to the claim that humans cannot describe the experience of a bat since we are not of the same type of being as a bat. That is to say that we are so different in our senses that we, humans, could never correctly describe the subjective character of experience of a bat. Nagel later uses the example, “Red is like the sound of a trumpet,” (449) to show the vanity of attempts at such descriptions between beings with differing sensory modalities (here between one with and one without vision). However, Nagel refuses to claim that all subjective characters of experience can never be described. He admits that humans may be able to understand a description of the subjective character of others’ experience since we are of the same type (beings with similar sensory modalities.) Nagel does not give a definitive divisor between types but posits only, “The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise.” (442)
Nagel notes that humans and intelligent Martians, who’s physical makeup and sensory modalities are completely different from our own, may be able to come to the same conclusion regarding the physical phenomena that constitute a rainbow, or clouds, or lightning. However, the Martians could never understand the human conception of these things in the same way that we could not understand a bat’s conception of these things. The problem, for Nagel, in understanding the subjective character of experience is that it is ordinarily the role of the sciences to describe reality in terms of objective descriptions. However, since the subjective character of experience is necessarily subject to a particular point of view, any attempt to objectively describe it would be a step further from a correct conception. Nagel asks, “Does it make sense … to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me?” (448)
Nagel concludes, noting that the pursuit of understanding consciousness may allow for objective descriptions of consciousness, but ultimate understanding of consciousness will not be possible until the question of subjective and objective is first answered.
Bibliography
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, 1974: 435-450.

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