What is it like to be a bat?
A 1974 essay by Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (born 1937), an American philosopher and Emeritus professor of philosophy at New York University wrote a landmark essay in 1974 titled What is it like to be a bat? He wanted to experience what a bat experiences, not as Thomas Nagel but as the creature in its very own psycho-sphere.
He starts by exhorting against the then current paradigm in understanding consciousness which he labels as the recent wave of reductionist euphoria. In effect he lambasts the effort of materialists in trying to explain consciousness as being born from the physical. In simple words, he disregards the efforts of scientists in trying to explain subjective experiences as being a product of matter. And even if this brain to mind transcription is indeed true, he says that it is still insufficient to understand the subjective viewpoint of the experiencer.
He sets the premise by saying that experience for an organism is equivalent to what it feels like to be that organism, not just to try to emulate to be that organism but to be the organism.
He chooses the bat as an example since the bat experiences the world with the help of sonar that we humans have no way of understanding from a first person perspective, but at the same time we humans can accept the fact that the bat does have an experience, however disconnected we may seem from it. He expresses the belief that it is not possible for human language to even grasp this elusive perspective, much like aliens from Mars wouldn't be able to relate to our unique way of relating to our environment.
He exhorts thinkers and future scientists to come up with ways to explore and develop schema and paradigm to crack this code. In the book, An Immense World, Ed Yong (born 1981) introduces us to the term Umwelt. It is a German word which crudely translates to “environment” but in fact is far more nuanced. It refers to a sensory bubble in which all organisms live. The bat experiences the world via its sonar mechanisms and therefore looks at the world very differently from us, thus it has its own Umweltan world, just like we have with our own limited sense-perception.
I have often heard people exhalting humans to have a superior form of consciousness but today Nagel gave me a new way to think about this question of inter-species difference. To call an organism inferior in conscious experience we would first have to understand their subjective viewpoint which I am sure none of us can grasp. We can only empathise and relate to them by anthropomorphising but to truly get their viewpoint requires a radical shift in our perspective. Even the word “perspective” seems ill-suited for that purpose.
Alan Watts, on of the greatest philosophers of our times, had this to say — Animals live in the eternal now, and that is why they don’t go crazy the way humans do. They are conscious, but their consciousness is not mediated by the same kind of symbolic thought (like language) that shapes human consciousness.
Thank you for reading.