Work · Analytic Philosophy
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
The subjective character of experience eludes physicalism.
Introduction
A short journal article, published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974 and later collected in Nagel’s Mortal Questions (1979). Nagel chose bats because they find their way by echolocation, a sense unlike any of ours: we could know everything about a bat’s brain and still not know what it is like to be one. An organism has conscious experience, he proposes, if there is “something it is like” to be that organism. Nagel does not claim that physicalism – the thesis that everything mental is physical – is false, only that we have no concept of how it could be true. The article became a standard starting point for debates about qualia and the “explanatory gap”.
Connections
Taken up in
- The View from Nowhere1986 · Thomas Nagel
- The Conscious Mind1996 · David Chalmers
Answered in
- Epiphenomenal Qualia1982 · Frank Jackson
Criticized in
- Consciousness Explained1991 · Daniel Dennett
More works by Thomas Nagel
Appears in
- Journey ‘The Riddle of Consciousness’ · Stop 7 of 10
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