What Is It Like To Be A Bat Essay

“Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.” While in Thomas Nagel’s What is it like to be a bat?, the definition of consciousness being written was consciousness can signify simple perception or attention, awareness in general, and self-awareness or voluntariness. They have the similar meaning based on what I have understand. In the first definition, consciousness is the state of being aware in our surrounding, being or having concern about a certain matter and capable to understand what is happening around you. This is the definition I always have in my mind whenever someone asks me a question regarding the definition of this word. The latter definition is where consciousness also has the same definition the first one has. Consciousness is …show more content…
He chose bat as an example because they are close enough to human beings. Bats has this echolocation which they perceive their surrounding. Our own experience can provide the basic material for our imagination as stated in What is it like to be a bat?. It tells us what it would be like for us to behave like a bat behaves but the question is, “What is it like for a bat to be a bat?” We may act like a bat but we won’t be able to describe what they are experiencing in their surrounding because our experiences are not like the bat’s experiences. Vice-versa for the bats or martians, they could ask “What is it like to be humans?”, they may also behave as humans but they can never be because their experiences are not same to us. Based on a video I have watched, “What is it like” doesn’t mean how our experiences be similar to “it” but how the subject be