Thomas Nagel (1981) – How is it like to be a bat?
Why does "consciousness" make the mind-body problem really intractable according to Thomas Nagel?
In his text “What is it like to be a bat?” of 1974 Thomas Nagel claims that consciousness is the barrier that makes the mind-body problem unique and so hard.
He states that consciousness is rarely addressed by reductionists. Because there is no really persuading reduction available, implausible accounts of the mental have been developed to help explain familiar kind of reductions. This has led to reductionists ignoring consciousness. But according to Nagel the mind-body problem is boring without consciousness.
Nagel now turns to conscious experience. He finds that some animals and
You could describe everything that happens in the head of someone who feels anger, further pogress in the neurosciences included. But no description of the objective, physical facts would deal with the subjective character of the experience itself.
For Nagel, then, there are only few things concerning the mind-body problem to be stated safely.
One of them is coming to the rescue of physicalism: mental states are states of the body; mental events are physical events. But he then admits that the apparent clarity of terms like “are” are deceiving. They just claim a reference. Without a theoretical framework that makes those references understandable, they still are not well defined. What we hold in our hands is the evidence that mental events have some physical description. But what we lack is the theoretical framework.
Nagel closes with some proposals: First he asks whether the question is properly stated: is there something at all, something really objective, how it is like to have his experiences, or can we only ask for subjective appearances? Second, Nagel speculates about the development of an objective phenomenology. We could develop concepts that describe experiences for others – we could, for example, start with blind people. Maybe this would