What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

This paper challenges the adequacy of current reductionist theories of mind by focusing on the subjective character of experience. Nagel argues that the "what it is like" aspect of conscious experience, or phenomenal character, is fundamentally irreducible to objective, physical descriptions. Using the example of a bat's experience, he demonstrates the limitations of extrapolating from human experience to understand consciousness in other organisms. He concludes that physicalism, while possibly true, is currently incomprehensible due to our lack of a conceptual framework to bridge the gap between subjective and objective descriptions of the mental.

Thomas Nagel