DE Weekly: Nagel, the Mind-Body Problem, & What Is It Like to Be A Bat?
Below is an archived email originally sent on August 17, 2026.
Nagel, the Mind-Body Problem, & What Is It Like to Be A Bat?
Earlier this year, I wrote about American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s 1971 essay “The Absurd,” a work exploring the absurdity of life so central in Existentialism, arguing that we should take a “backward step” from our own perceptions to view the irony in our human condition.
I mentioned then that, although that essay is definitely interesting, I believe Nagel’s most interesting ideas have to do with consciousness and subjective experience.
Today, we’ll examine some of those very ideas through another one of Nagel’s essays, namely his 1974 philosophical essay, “What Is It Like to Be A Bat?”
“What Is It Like to Be A Bat?” is an essay that argues that we, as humans, cannot fully understand what it is “like” to be a bat. As humans, Nagel argues, we approach such questions as the title of the essay through our own consciousness, or our conscious experience. And, consciousness has a subjective “what-it-is-like” character.
The problem with this is that physical science (and other fundamentally materialist, reductionist methods)––which we typically use to understand most things––cannot fully explain or answer a question like this.
We cannot reduce the inner, subjective experience to simply physical, materialist explanations.
For example, bats use echolocation to navigate in the dark, a biological process emitting sound waves that bounce off objects and return as echoes.
Nothing like this exists in the world of humans and is not available to us within our senses. How, then, could we ever understand what this is like?
Nagel writes that there are several difficulties posed by the phenomenological approach to consciousness with which we are privy to use, including that “facts beyond the reach of human concepts” limit our objectivity, since the “phenomenological features” of subjective experience ultimately limit our human imagination and understanding of the “what-it-is-like” of a conscious thing other than ourselves.
This phenomenon is more difficult with some beings than others. It might be easier for us to understand what it is a dog sees, for example, since we know what black and white would look like. In fact, some colorblind humans only do see black and white.
It might be easier for humans with total blindness to understand what other kinds of animals with total blindness experience.
But, with an animal as unique and with as wildly different a subjective experience from us as a bat, we again ask ourselves, how on earth could we possibly understand what it is like to be a bat?
What brings us to this conclusion is that Nagel assumes that “conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon” present in most, if not all animals in some way, especially mammals. It follows, therefore, that all animals must have a subjective character of experience of the world.
“An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism––something that it is like for the organism.” So it must be with a bat.
But, since we cannot truly place ourselves in the consciousness of a bat, we cannot show what the subjectivity of their conscious experience is like. Furthermore, trying to explain their consciousness from a reductionist standpoint would be futile, since we cannot discard the subjective experience.
To summarize: every subjective experience is connected with a single point of view, which we cannot know for sure, since it is not ours. What is more, trying to consider any conscious experience as objective is infeasible, since that is not how consciousness works.
We can imagine what it is like to hang upside down in a cave, to fly around, and to have little to no vision, but we still cannot fully understand what it is like to be a bat, because we have not the slightest idea what it is like for that creature to experience life as a bat––we are always imagining ourselves as a human as a bat.
What stands in the way of our ever understanding the true subjective experience of a bat is something called the Mind-Body problem.
The Mind-Body problem asks how our subjective conscious experiences connect with our physical brains and bodies, how an organ like the brain creates the non-physical world of inner awareness (consciousness).
This is similar to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, which I also wrote about over a year ago.
The Mind-Body problem presents a gap in our understanding as it relates to consciousness, stemming from the fact that physical processes in the brain and body simply do not explain how or why we feel or understand things, at least not satisfactorily.
It is a problem that makes strict scientific reductionism, materialism, and physicalism impossible when it comes to discussing consciousness.
It was Nagel, in fact, who wrote in “What Is It Like to Be A Bat?”, “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
“. . . [P]hilosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different.”
So, after all this, when we ask ourselves what it is like to be a bat, what is the answer? Are we any closer to understanding, any closer to being able to experience it?
No. Each of us has a unique, subjective conscious experience that we perceive in our own inner worlds and minds.
And, each of those subjective experiences are relative to our human experience.
None of us can know “what-it-is-like” for a bat to be a bat. We can only imagine.
“Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.” –– Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be A Bat?
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I think this one was a fun detour from the typical literature I write about, while still being totally involved in the same subject matter. I hope you liked it.
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