What Is It Like To Be A Bat By Nagel

If there was one article that really stuck out to me throughout the semester, it has to be Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat”. It’s concept and philosophy fixed itself into me and I tried applying those ideas to other articles as we went on. This article addresses one of the big questions of consciousness that tends to float around when discussing philosophy, which is what is it like to be something other than yourself? It isn’t too often that you debate on whether or not something or someone is experiencing the same feelings obtained through the environment as you are. While the article asks a simple question that may has a simple scapegoat answer in my opinion, there are different aspects that should be addressed as to why it is easy to …show more content…
What is it like to be a bat? We’ll never know nor will we ever truly know what it is like to be another person other than ourselves. The only way possible to do this would be to literally insert your consciousness into another person’s consciousness, which even then, you would still be composed of your previous consciousness, thus making you incapable of understanding what it is like to be another person. That is why the saying “imagine yourself in their shoes” will constantly bother me for now on, because it is literally impossible to know how another person is experiencing their life. This is not to say that empathy cannot exist, but understanding another person’s conscious experience is impossible without actually being that person. With that being said, I really wanted to make light of the ease of explaining this question and argument, as a rather complicated discussion comes up, but as of now the answer will always be the same. Humans cannot know what it is like to be a bat, because we are not a …show more content…
It is seemingly impossible to reduce conscious experience down to the objective parts and analyze what it would be like to be another organism. Posing counterarguments to his argument are easily nullified just because of how hard it would be to come up with a good argument against his. My depiction of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat”, although simple in terms of content, capture the likeness of the argument, and in response, displays the simple, yet strong comparison Nagel makes. Because of this, I think that this should be one of the initial philosophies introduced to a person interested in the study, as it gives a basis of what conscious experience truly is and how it should be