22"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"Thomas NagelPhilosophy is ... infected by a broader tendency of contemporary intellectuallife; scientism. Scientism is actually a special form of idealism, for it puts onetype of human understanding in charge of the universe and what can be saidabout it. At its most myopic it assumes that everything there is must beunderstandable by the employment of scientific theories like those we havedeveloped to date—physics and evolutionary biology are the currentparadigms—as if the present age were not just one in the series.—ThomasNagel (1986)My intuitions about what "cannot be adequately understood" and what is"patently real" do not match Nagel's. Our tastes are very different. Nagel, forinstance, is oppressed by the desire to develop an evolutionary explanation ofthe human intellect; I am exhilarated by the prospect. My sense thatphilosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the physical sciencesgrounds both my modesty about philosophical method and my optimism aboutphilosophical progress. To Nagel, this is mere scientism.—Daniel Dennett(1984)Thomas Nagel is a professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He has writtenextensively on topics in ethics and the philosophy of mind. His book The View from Nowhere (1986), thisreading, and Reading 32 (also by Nagel) have been the focus of much discussion in the philosophy ofmind. Although this reading differs from Reading 32 in topic, they both (like Colin McGinn in Reading 26)emphasize the limitations of anything like our current concepts and theories for understanding humanconsciousness-In this reading Nagel will argue that there is something very fundamental about thehuman mind and minds in general which scientifically inspired philosophy of mind inevitably and perhapswilfully ignores. He uses various words for That something—"consciousness," "subjectivity," "point ofview," and "what it is like to be (this sort of subject)." The last expression is in the title of his paper andseems to fit his argument most precisely- It refers to what most people have in mind when they line upin amusement parks to get on wild and scary roller-coaster rides. Unless they're anthropologists orreporters at work, they aren't trying to learn anything. Nor are they trying to accomplish anything—they're paying to let something intense happen to them. They want an experience, a thrill; they want whatit's like to be in that kind of motion. The meanings of the other expressions overlap with the last butalso include other things.

322 PART VII CONSCIOUSNESSAND QUALIAFor instance, "conscious(ness)" can signify simple perception or attention ("She becameconscious of a noise In the room"), awareness in general ("He regained consciousness"),and self-awareness or voluntariness ("Did you do it consciously?"). "Point of view" has amore cognitive overtone. We think of points of view as shaped by values, beliefs,education, and other social and psychological factors. These factors may possibly play arole in what it's like to be on a roller-coaster, but they have little bearing on what we meanwhen we say a blind person doesn't know what it's like to see, and when we wonder whatit's like to be a bat. "Subjectivity" is fairly close in meaning, but it can also signifysomething you can and should avoid—a stance that gets in the way of objectivity andfairness; yet you can’t stop being a human subject with a human type of subjectivity.You're stuck with the experience of what it's like to be a human being.Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problemreally intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussionsof the problem give it little attention or get it obviouslywrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria hasproduced several analyses of mental phenomena andmental concepts designed to explain the possibility ofsome variety of materialism, psychophysicalidentification, or reduction.1 But the problems dealt witharc those common to this type of reduction and othertypes, and what makes the mind-body problem unique,and unlike the water-H20 problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electricaldischarge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oaktree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.2Every reductionist has his favorite analogy frommodern science. It is most unlikely that any of theseunrelated examples of successful reduction will shedlight on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophersshare the general human weakness for explanations ofwhat is incomprehensible in termsReprinted from The Philosophical Review 83 (1974); 435-50. 01974 Cornell University. Reprinted by permission.1Examples are J.J. C. Smart, Philosophy and ScientificRealism (London, 1963); David K. Lewis, "An Argument for theIdentity Theory." Journal of Philosophy LXIll (1966 reprinted withaddenda in David M. Rosenthal. Materialism & the Mind-BodyProblem (Englewood Cliffs. N. J., 1971);Hilary Putnam, "Psychological Predicates," in Capitan andMerril An, Mind, & Religion (Pittsburgh. 1967). reprinted inRosenthal, op. cit., as "The Nature of Mental States"; D. M.Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of (Ac Mind (London, 1968); D,C, Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London, 1969). I haveexpressed earlier doubts in "Armstrong on the Mind."Philosophical Review LXXIX (1970). 394-403; "Brain Bisectionand [he Unity of Consciousness," Synthese 22 (1971); and areview of Dennett. Journal of Philosophy LXIX (1972). See alsoSaul Kripke, "Naming and Necessity" in Davidson and Harman,Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht, 1972), esp. pp. 334 -342: and M. T. Thomson, "Ostensive Terms and Materialism,"The Monist 56 (1972).iThis list contains two very different types of relations: (3) Ofthe macro-perceptible to the micro-imperceptible (water, lightning,oak) and (2) of function to embodiment (Turing machine andgene). ED.
suited for what is familiar and well understood, thoughentirely different. This has led to the acceptance ofimplausible accounts of the mental largely because theywould permit familiar kinds of reduction. 1 shall try toexplain why the usual examples do not help us tounderstand the relation between the mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of whatan explanation of the physical nature of a mentalphenomenon would be. Without consciousness themind-body problem would be much less interesting.With consciousness it seems hopeless. The mostimportant and characteristic feature of conscious mentalphenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionisttheories do not even try to explain it. And carefulexamination will show that no currently availableconcept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a newtheoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but sucha solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectualfuture.Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon.It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannotbe sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it isvery difficult to say in general what provides evidenceof it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny iteven of mammals other than man.)3 No doubt it occursin countless forms3Tissues, organs,. and organ systems of a multicellularorganism are successively higher Ievels of functional organizationamong cells. The various organ systems consist of largepopulations of cells that have evolved to specialize in one orother of the vital functions carried out by unicellular organisms asthey maintain and replicate themselves. For instance, thedigestive system specializes in what a bacterium does when ITselectively permits various molecules to cross its membraneand uses them as reactants in metabolic processes. Similarly,the central nervous system specializes in generically the lameadaptive control function exercised by bacterial DNA as itregulates the cell's metabolic activity- There is a fairlysmooth progression of" nervous systems from the veryprimitive BO them great complexity or the mammalian andhuman systems Unless we take