What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in "The Philosophical Review" in October 1974, and later in Nagel's "Mortal Questions" (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by consciousness, including the possible insolubility of the mind-body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing. Nagel famously asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to "be" that organism—something it is like "for" the organism." This assertion has achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution." Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness." Peter Hacker analyzes Nagel's statement as not only "malconstructed" but philosophically "misconceived" as a definition of consciousness, and he asserts that Nagel's paper "laid the groundwork for…forty years of fresh confusion about consciousness."
Q350239
Thomas Nagel
PER
Q1817560
The Philosophical Review
MEDIA
Q7087
consciousness
Concept
Q2741122
mind-body problem
Concept
Q206829
reductionism
Concept
Q215263
Daniel Dennett
PER
Q712696
Peter Hacker
PER
Q2703462
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
MEDIA
1974-10-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
October 1974
DATE
+1979^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal
1979
NUMBER
author
published in
publication date