the fact that an organism has conscious
experience at all means, basically, that
there is something it is like to be that
organism. There may be further implications
about the form of the experience; there may
even (though I doubt it) be implications
about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally
an organism has conscious mental states if
and only if there is something that it is
to be that organism—something it is like
for the organism.
We may call this the subjective character
of experience. It is not captured by any
of the familiar, recently devised reductive
analyses of the mental, for all of them are
logically compatible with its absence. It
is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory
system of functional states, or intentional
states, since these could be ascribed to
robots or automata that behaved like people
though they experienced nothing.
What is it like to be a bat by Thomas Nagel | Athenaeum Library of Philosophy - 0 views
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I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
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My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts. Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend. Indeed, it would be foolish to doubt this, given the finiteness of humanity's expectations. After all there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them. But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted for ever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type. This impossibility might even be observed by other beings, but it is not clear that the existence of such beings, or the possibility of their existence, is a precondition of the significance of the hypothesis that there are humanly inaccessible facts. (After all, the nature of beings with access to humanly inaccessible facts is presumably itself a humanly inaccessible fact.) Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.
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