The comparison to sound doesn't make sense to me. There are vibrations in a medium, of a sort that we're capable of detecting. Then there's our awareness of it. (Whether we call the vibrations "sound" and our awareness of it "awareness of sound", like reasonable people, or whether we call the awareness "sound" and then lament our lack of any succinct description for the vibrations themselves, doesn't make any difference to anything, beyond the inconvenience we can choose to pointlessly cause ourselves.) It seems as though Nagel is going to get something out of the putative fact that there's no such distinction between awareness of something and introspection about the fact that we're aware of it. Of course there's a distinction there. If a baseball player watches the ball and successfully hits it, they're aware of the ball. But they're not thinking about the fact that they're aware of the ball. We know they're not, because hitting a competently pitched baseball is difficult: so difficult that a human being can't do it while also contemplating the nature of consciousness. Explaining how they see the ball, and get both the timing and the trajectory of their swing right despite the limitations on how long various processes take and how precise a muscle twitch can be, isn't the same as explaining how we process language and convert back and forth between our verbal understandings and our visual and visceral experience of the events we're talking about. Explaining the process of swinging a baseball bat (I swear that I just chose an example of something too hard to simultaneously do and contemplate, _without_ any conscious intention of typing the phrase "what it's like to be a batter") throws away the question of how our verbal processing works, but so what? Throwing away one question while answering a different question is perfectly normal, and nothing in particular follows from it.
The comparison to sound doesn't make sense to me. There are vibrations in a medium, of a sort that we're capable of detecting. Then there's our awareness of it. (Whether we call the vibrations "sound" and our awareness of it "awareness of sound", like reasonable people, or whether we call the awareness "sound" and then lament our lack of any succinct description for the vibrations themselves, doesn't make any difference to anything, beyond the inconvenience we can choose to pointlessly cause ourselves.) It seems as though Nagel is going to get something out of the putative fact that there's no such distinction between awareness of something and introspection about the fact that we're aware of it. Of course there's a distinction there. If a baseball player watches the ball and successfully hits it, they're aware of the ball. But they're not thinking about the fact that they're aware of the ball. We know they're not, because hitting a competently pitched baseball is difficult: so difficult that a human being can't do it while also contemplating the nature of consciousness. Explaining how they see the ball, and get both the timing and the trajectory of their swing right despite the limitations on how long various processes take and how precise a muscle twitch can be, isn't the same as explaining how we process language and convert back and forth between our verbal understandings and our visual and visceral experience of the events we're talking about. Explaining the process of swinging a baseball bat (I swear that I just chose an example of something too hard to simultaneously do and contemplate, _without_ any conscious intention of typing the phrase "what it's like to be a batter") throws away the question of how our verbal processing works, but so what? Throwing away one question while answering a different question is perfectly normal, and nothing in particular follows from it.