Nagel believes that conscious experience exists in many different forms of animal life; although, he is not sure that it exists in lower animals or what would count as evidence for consciousness (421). The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all, for Nagel, means that there is something that it is like to be that organism, in other words—what it is like for the organism. This "what it is like" he calls this the "subjective character" of experience.
This subjective character of experience is not captured by any of the theories that try to reduce the mental to something else. These are all logically compatible with its absence and it can't be analyzed in terms of: functional or intentional states. This is due to the fact that functional or intentional states can be ascribed to robots that behave like us but do not experience anything and the causal role of experience in generating typical behavior, for similar reasons. This doesn’t deny that conscious mental states cause behavior, …show more content…
This implies that they can be understood from many points of view by different types of organism. So an organism doesn’t need to be a human to understand human neurophysiology or using Nagel example with a bat, one doesn’t need to be a bat to understand bat neurophysiology. On the other hand, it’s a mystery how the subjective character could be observed in the physical operation of the organism if facts about the subjective character of experience can be known from a particular point of view. Nagel regards subjective and objective point of view as a matter of degree (424). He argues that in the case of something like the studying of thunder, it makes sense to try to go as far as possible in the objective direction. A perfectly objective intrinsic nature of the thing is implied since he is non-committal on the question whether there is an end-point to the
This subjective character of experience is not captured by any of the theories that try to reduce the mental to something else. These are all logically compatible with its absence and it can't be analyzed in terms of: functional or intentional states. This is due to the fact that functional or intentional states can be ascribed to robots that behave like us but do not experience anything and the causal role of experience in generating typical behavior, for similar reasons. This doesn’t deny that conscious mental states cause behavior, …show more content…
This implies that they can be understood from many points of view by different types of organism. So an organism doesn’t need to be a human to understand human neurophysiology or using Nagel example with a bat, one doesn’t need to be a bat to understand bat neurophysiology. On the other hand, it’s a mystery how the subjective character could be observed in the physical operation of the organism if facts about the subjective character of experience can be known from a particular point of view. Nagel regards subjective and objective point of view as a matter of degree (424). He argues that in the case of something like the studying of thunder, it makes sense to try to go as far as possible in the objective direction. A perfectly objective intrinsic nature of the thing is implied since he is non-committal on the question whether there is an end-point to the