Exploring Consciousness: The Mysterious Subjectivity of Being
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What is it like to be a bat? This curious question looms large in the history of consciousness studies. First asked in the 1950s, it was made famous by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel in 1974. He used the question to challenge materialism, to explore what we mean by consciousness, and to see why it makes the mind–body problem so intractable. What we mean, he said, is subjectivity. If there is something it is like to be the bat – something for the bat itself, then the bat is conscious. If there is nothing it is like to be the bat, then it is not.
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So think, for example, of the mug, or pot, or plastic ornament on your table. Now ask – what is it like to be the mug? You will probably answer that it is like nothing at all; that mugs cannot feel, that china is inert, and so on. You will probably have no trouble in opining that pots and mugs are not conscious. But move on to worms, ?ies, bacteria, or bats and you may have more trouble. You do not know – indeed, you cannot know – what it is like to be an earthworm. Even so, if you think the worm exists then you believe that the worm is conscious.
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Nagel chose the bat as his example because bats are so very different from us. They ?y, live mostly in the dark, hang upside-down from trees or in damp caves, and use sonar, not vision, to see the world. That is, they emit rapid bursts of high-pitched squeaks while they ?y and then, by analysing the echoes that come back to their sensitive ears, learn about the world around them. What is it like to experience the world this way? It is no good imagining that you are a bat because an educated, speaking bat would not be a normal bat at all; conversely, if you became a normal bat and could not think or speak then you would not be able to answer your own question. There is no generally agreed de?nition of consciousness, but the following gives some idea of what is meant by the word.
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‘What it’s like to be ...’ : If there is something it is like to be an animal (or computer, or baby) then that thing is conscious. Otherwise it is not. Subjectivity or phenomenality: Consciousness means subjective experience or phenomenal experience. This is the way things seem to me, as opposed to how they are objectively. Qualia: The ineffable subjective qualities of experience, such as the redness of red or the indescribable smell of turpentine. Some philosophers claim they do not exist. The hard problem: How do subjective experiences arise from objective brains? Nagel argued that we can never know and from this concluded that the problem is insoluble. For this reason he is dubbed a mysterian. Another mysterian is the American philosopher Colin McGinn, who argues that we humans are ‘cognitively closed’ with respect to understanding consciousness.
