What is it like to be a bat?
Thomas Nagel
Ioana Vasi‘s review
Jan 26, 2019
it was amazing
Sam Harris Waking Up has lead me to this short essay, in which the American philosopher Thomas Nagel explores the possibility of bridging the distance between the subjective and the objective experience. At least something good came out of reading SHs awful book.
Nagel is reasonable and generous (or ironic?) when he concedes the possibility of utilizing a broader range of techniques (besides imagination, sympathy) in the future, in order for us to gain a better objective understanding of subjective mental processes. Without hinting what those might be, it remains a huge leap to make. I believe he is right, we just might. I also think there will always be a gap we may never fully bridge with anything but poetry (preferably martian in this case). Well, at least I hope we won’t…not sure I’d enjoy learning how to feel like a bat from a manual…better if things remain silly.
I highly recommend this, it’s a delightful exercise only 17 pages long.
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the sur- rounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feetin an attic. 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.
To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure,my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.
Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.
Strangely enough, we may have evidence for the truth of something we cannot really understand. Suppose a caterpillar is locked in a sterile safe by someone unfamiliar with insect-metamorphosis, and weeks later the safe is reopened,revealing a butterfly. If the person knows that the safe has been shut the whole time, he has reason to believe that the butterfly is or was once the caterpillar, without having any idea in what sense this might be so. (One possibility is that the caterpillar contained a tiny winged parasite that devoured it and grew into the butterfly).
If one understood how subjective experiences could have an objective nature, one would understand the existence of subjects other than oneself.
(Goodreads.com)