Nagel What Is It Like To Be A Bat Analysis

I believe that Nagel 's primary conclusion in “What is it like to be a bat?” is that while there are multiple different forms of consciousness, humans cannot be sure of the presence of consciousness in lesser forms of animals, such as a bat. The “what it is like” for Nagel is reworded as being subjective character. The bat has subjective character, which is experience. Even though we know that bats hang upside down, have webbed arms and feet, and use echolocation, we will never truly know what it is like to be a bat. While we can all have thoughts on what it is like to be a bat, Nagel states that because everything has its own interpretation of itself, there is no way we can add specific information into our minds to actually see what it is …show more content…
Bats on the other hand are a different species, and have a different brain. This even makes it more difficult to experience what a bat does because their brain has specific functions such as recognizing the impulses of echolocation. Because bats perceive distance, size, shape, and motion through echolocation, their experience could not objectively be like ours. It seems to me that Nagel is saying that there aren 't any methods to extrapolate the inner life of a bat in our own mind. While humans can imagine how bats behave, this is not the argument. The argument is what it is like to be a bat. The experiences of a bat seem to be one of the main premises of Nagel 's argument. Even imagining what it would be like to be a bat would not be enough to see the experiences of bats. Bats are known to have versions of pain,hunger, and lust, however each of these experiences have their own subject character. Because each of these have their own subjective character, we cannot conceive these experiences. However Nagel states that human scientists have no obstacles finding knowledge about the experiences because they wouldn 't be able to describe our own