What it is like to be a bat?

May 14, 2025 | 1,206 words | 6min read

Paper Title: What it is like to be a bat?
Link to Paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183914?seq=1
Date: October 1974
Paper Type: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind
Short Abstract:
In this paper, Nagel poses the question “What is it like to be a bat?” He concludes that it is impossible for humans to truly know, as humans and bats are too different in terms of experience and perspective. He uses this argument to challenge the “reduction to physicalism” movement, asserting that the subjective nature of consciousness cannot be fully explained by physicalist approaches.

Introduction and the Rise of Reductionism

In recent times, there has been a wave of reductionism, i.e., reducing phenomena such as sound or sight to purely physical matter. However, the ‘mind-body’ problem is unique and differs from other problems, such as the water-H2O example.

Philosophers, like the general population, tend to explain the incomprehensible in terms of what is familiar to them. This tendency has led to implausible accounts of consciousness and the mental, because reduction is not possible in this case. What makes the mind-body problem so difficult is consciousness, and most reductionist accounts do not even attempt to explain it.

The Nature of Consciousness and Subjectivity

Consciousness, in general, is a widespread phenomenon, occurring in many levels of animal life and organisms, though we cannot be certain about simpler life forms or what exactly consciousness is. But what does it mean to be conscious? Fundamentally, an organism is conscious if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism.

Let’s consider bats. Bats have experiences. Although they are more closely related to us than other species, they have a range of activities and sensory organs that are very different from humans. They perceive the external world using sonar/echolocation, where sound waves bounce back from objects and are funneled into their ears. Their brains are designed to make sense of this incoming information. What they experience would be totally alien to us. It is not similar to any sense that we possess. Therefore, there is no reason to think it is subjectively like anything we can experience or perceive. This makes it difficult to think about what it is like to be a bat, and we must extrapolate from the human inner life to the bat’s. However, our imagination is limited by our own experiences. We lack access to the bat’s subjective point of view, and understanding the bat’s consciousness is fundamentally constrained by our own perspective.

The Subjective Experience of Other Beings

We can describe the general type of experience, such as describing the bat’s sonar as a form of three-dimensional forward perception. Additionally, we believe that they have some version of pain, fear, hunger, and lust. But making broad assumptions is all we can do—we ultimately cannot grasp their specific subjective character. This characteristic is not limited to animals like bats but also applies to other humans and even aliens. However, just because we cannot fully conceive of the subjective experience of other beings, like bats or aliens, does not mean these beings do not have consciousness, i.e., a subjective experience. In other words, just because epistemology is unclear, this is a separate question from ontology.

The Gap Between Subjectivity and Objectivity

Most people would agree that there are facts beyond the mind of humans—things we might never know. But one could further believe that there are facts that could not even be represented by humans, even if our species lasted forever, simply because our minds lack the prerequisite structures. And just as this is true for us, it can also be true for other species looking at us humans. Importantly, the problem raised here is not one of access to the consciousness of a single individual, but rather that of type. We can take the viewpoint of others, but this can only be done if we are sufficiently similar to that being or individual.

This is not, in itself, an argument against reductionism. For example, an alien that lacks visual perception could understand everything about light, rainbows, and lightning as physical phenomena, but they wouldn’t understand the human conception of light, rainbow, and lightning. The objective part of these concepts can be understood because, even though they are connected to a subjective lens, they can be understood from an external point of view. But the subjective part cannot be understood. This is different with consciousness, i.e., subjective experience. What do we mean when we say we understand it from an objective lens? If we remove subjectivity from subjective experience to look at it objectively, what would be left? What would be left of what it was like to be a bat if we removed the viewpoint of a bat? If we have a subjective experience and want to investigate it objectively, that means treating it like an object from an external view. But by doing this, we remove exactly what makes the experience subjective. How can we objectively know what it means to be when being is a relationship between a subject and an object? Objectifying this would mean removing the subject, making the relationship meaningless.

The Inadequacy of Current Reductionist Theories

In principle, with other phenomena, reductionism works by reducing the subjectivity, by removing our own point of view. We describe it in more general terms by means other than human perception. But we can’t investigate consciousness, i.e., having a subjective experience, in the same way because subjective experience is inherently tied to a specific point of view. Consciousness is inherently bound to a first-person perspective. Any shift to objectivity takes us further away from what consciousness is. This is a bigger problem because reductionists, in general, take phenomena and remove their subjectivity. But then we don’t explain the subjectivity of the phenomena. If we agree that a physical theory of mind needs to account for the subjective character of experience, then no current theory adequately explains this.

The Problem with Physicalism

This is not to say that physicalism is false. Physicalism states that mental states are states of the body, or mental states are physical events. The problem is that we do not know which physical states these are. Normally, “X is Y” is rather clear, but when X and Y are very different, as in the case of mental and physical states, it may not be clear how this could be true. But we can have evidence for the truth of things we don’t understand. Suppose a caterpillar is locked in a sterile safe by someone unfamiliar with insect metamorphosis, and weeks later the safe is reopened, revealing a butterfly. If the person knows that the safe has been shut the whole time, they have reason to believe that the butterfly is or was once the caterpillar, without having any idea in what sense this might be so. It could be that we are in a similar position with physicalism.

Nagel’s Suggestion for Closing the Gap

Thomas Nagel suggests that, in order to close the gap between subjectivity and objectivity, we should first try to explain to a person who is blind from birth what it is like to see. If we can do this, we might also be able to solve the objective-subjective problem.

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