A reductionist approach to the mind-body problem views everything mental as essentially materialistic and made up of mechanistic parts. However, we would expect a reductionist to have a hard time reducing consciousness to something physical, because we do not fully understand consciousness. In this reading, Nagel first defines consciousness to be “what it is like to be something”, then explains our lack of understanding of such consciousness by presenting and then doubting a common way we have attempted to understand consciousness, namely physicalism which states that everything is made up of physical parts. In his words, “physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at
present have any conception of how it might be true” (Nagel, 446).
In his refutation, Nagel invites us to imagine how it is like to be a bat. He aims to conclude that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, because any speculation we have about how it is like to be a bat, is limited to our own experience. And our experience is nothing like the experience of bats. He also expects the objection that bats do not possess consciousness by pointing out that this lack of understanding goes both ways. An intelligent bat also does not know what it is like to be us, but it does not mean we do not have consciousness.
The reason why the bat example is supposed to be generalized is that if we cannot comprehend bat’s consciousness, it is the nature of consciousness that we do not comprehend, rather than anything physically particular to bat. Since physicalism do not provide us with an understanding of consciousness in general, it is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.
A concise structure of the bat argument is as follows:
- P1: Our imagination has a limited range, because its basic material is provided by the imaginer’s experience (Nagel, 439).
- P2: We ascribe general type of experience on the basis of animals’ structure and behavior, which is different from ours (Nagel, 439).
- P3: If our imagination is limited by our experience (P1), and our experience is different from animals’ experience (P2), the “extrapolation” from my experience is incompletable to the type of experience of being a bat (Nagel, 439).
- Q (Conclusion): Bats’ type of experiences has “a specific subjective character, which is beyond our ability to conceive” (Nagel, 439).
I disagree with Nagel on P2, which distinguishes my experience from bats’ experience due to our physical differences. Nagel thinks in this case, the distinction decides that we at best could imagine the type of experience bats have, but not anything beyond that (the specific tokens of experience that bats have). However, for two experience to be different, they need to have different content. For example, if I go into haunted house together with a dog, though we are two beings inevitably experiencing the haunted house separately, I would still say we had the same experience---we both experienced exactly the same scares that was designed to be there. If I am in the haunted house at the same time with a bat, we are having the same experience, though we might process it differently.
Now let us come back to the example that Nagel brings up, echolocation. To say that me echolocating and bats echolocating are two different instances of echolocation, it is implied that there is something distinctively me-like in my echolocation. However, echolocation is just echolocation, it is an experience with specific content. For both I and the bat, echolocation consists of receiving information through sound waves. There is nothing bat-specific in the content of echolocation. In other words, my experience of echolocation and the experience of bat have the same content, and hence are the same experience. Since my experience can overlap with that of a bat, it is hopeful that I may be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat.
Reference
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, n.d., 435–50.
Comentários