I find the bat example quite unfortunate because the problem is not whether we can understand the subjectivity of bats but whether we can understand the subjectivity of humans. These two subjectivities are different due to bat's lack of cognitive processess. So how does the argument that we can never truly get what it is for a bat to have a subjective experience support the argument that we can never truly get what it is for us to have a subjective experience?
I don't think Nagel's argument is coherent because putting a bat's experience under analysis requires a level of consciousness that is not available to a bat so the question/though experiment destroys itself.
Surely that is the point of what Nagel is saying, we have an inability to comprehend what the consciousness of a bat is like. So with this how can you be sure that a bat does not have that level of consciousness. The essence of his argument Is that we can look and study a bats brain but we will never truly know what it is like to be a bat.
I don't believe that what Nagel is saying is completely valid because physicalism and neuroscience, in general, is so young and already tells so much on ways in which the bat uses its brain to live. Dennet's response to Nagel is the most valid in my opinion because it shows that a Bats mind, is in facts accessible due to what we know about the way in they use echolocation. I also think that the biggest flaw for Nagel is within his idea of categories and how that could allow us to understand what it is like to be a bat, for example, if I have two things in common does that mean that I qualify and can understand it, where's the line. How do we quantify these categories that he has created, it's a vague characteristic that has come from an argument that we can later see as so absolute and sets a stupidly high bar for physicalism.
@@callumdavis8809 I may be misunderstanding your objection. And I am not exactly a Thomas Nagel fan. But let me draw on David Hume. Contrary to what most people believe who know of is arguments about cause and effect, Hume did not deny the existence of such a relation. Instead, he denied that we actually experience this relation. We regard other things, such as constant conjunction, as the basis of the causal claim, but that evidence does not establish the affirmed relation. In short, even assuming the existence of cause and effect, Hume was an epistemological skeptic about our ability to actually "know" that relation. It is always an inference beyond our data. Would not this analysis also apply to our view of a bat's consciousness? No matter how the bat presents as phenomena that we observe, unless we define consciousness as such observed behavior, we observe the physical results of whatever the bat's consciousness seems to produce. We observe the physical results but not the bat's consciousness associated with them. In fact, the association of that consciousness with the observed results is actually obscure. For example, eliminative materialists affirm that the common-sense interpretation for the "motives" of our actions are not what they seem to be. That is, a free choice among options is not actually a free choice at all--no matter how this seems to us. So the association between human consciousness and human behavior is not exactly obvious--not even to the human person explaining his or her behavior. That interpretation would actually be dismissed as folk psychology. So I should think that the bat's consciousness would be more problematic. We simply don't observe the bat's consciousness, and they won't offer any subjective interpretations. We simply have our observations, but the bat's consciousness, like Kant's noumenal world, remains closed to us. So I agree with you. Nagel is saying that we must become other than ourselves in order to know bat consciousness. We must become bats, but that is not possible. Moreover, the behavioral definition of consciousness seems falsified by our own experience. Of course, we can develop models that explain our observations of bat behavior, but I don't see how such a model could be claimed to be equivalent to the bat's consciousness without committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
![Thomas Nagel - What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [Philosophy Audiobook]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ryzrOo2reKo/mqdefault.jpg)
I find the bat example quite unfortunate because the problem is not whether we can understand the subjectivity of bats but whether we can understand the subjectivity of humans. These two subjectivities are different due to bat's lack of cognitive processess. So how does the argument that we can never truly get what it is for a bat to have a subjective experience support the argument that we can never truly get what it is for us to have a subjective experience?
What if I do have an Exact same experience of bat coconsciousness, for 10 minutes? And keep both my experience and the bats experiences?
I don't think Nagel's argument is coherent because putting a bat's experience under analysis requires a level of consciousness that is not available to a bat so the question/though experiment destroys itself.
Surely that is the point of what Nagel is saying, we have an inability to comprehend what the consciousness of a bat is like. So with this how can you be sure that a bat does not have that level of consciousness. The essence of his argument Is that we can look and study a bats brain but we will never truly know what it is like to be a bat.
I don't believe that what Nagel is saying is completely valid because physicalism and neuroscience, in general, is so young and already tells so much on ways in which the bat uses its brain to live. Dennet's response to Nagel is the most valid in my opinion because it shows that a Bats mind, is in facts accessible due to what we know about the way in they use echolocation. I also think that the biggest flaw for Nagel is within his idea of categories and how that could allow us to understand what it is like to be a bat, for example, if I have two things in common does that mean that I qualify and can understand it, where's the line. How do we quantify these categories that he has created, it's a vague characteristic that has come from an argument that we can later see as so absolute and sets a stupidly high bar for physicalism.
@@callumdavis8809 I may be misunderstanding your objection. And I am not exactly a Thomas Nagel fan. But let me draw on David Hume. Contrary to what most people believe who know of is arguments about cause and effect, Hume did not deny the existence of such a relation. Instead, he denied that we actually experience this relation. We regard other things, such as constant conjunction, as the basis of the causal claim, but that evidence does not establish the affirmed relation. In short, even assuming the existence of cause and effect, Hume was an epistemological skeptic about our ability to actually "know" that relation. It is always an inference beyond our data. Would not this analysis also apply to our view of a bat's consciousness? No matter how the bat presents as phenomena that we observe, unless we define consciousness as such observed behavior, we observe the physical results of whatever the bat's consciousness seems to produce. We observe the physical results but not the bat's consciousness associated with them. In fact, the association of that consciousness with the observed results is actually obscure.
For example, eliminative materialists affirm that the common-sense interpretation for the "motives" of our actions are not what they seem to be. That is, a free choice among options is not actually a free choice at all--no matter how this seems to us. So the association between human consciousness and human behavior is not exactly obvious--not even to the human person explaining his or her behavior. That interpretation would actually be dismissed as folk psychology. So I should think that the bat's consciousness would be more problematic. We simply don't observe the bat's consciousness, and they won't offer any subjective interpretations. We simply have our observations, but the bat's consciousness, like Kant's noumenal world, remains closed to us. So I agree with you. Nagel is saying that we must become other than ourselves in order to know bat consciousness. We must become bats, but that is not possible. Moreover, the behavioral definition of consciousness seems falsified by our own experience. Of course, we can develop models that explain our observations of bat behavior, but I don't see how such a model could be claimed to be equivalent to the bat's consciousness without committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.