“What Is Like to Be a Bat” by Thomas Nagel

Nagel’s groundbreaking mental exercise has inspired years of inquiry and study into animals and human awareness, yet it continues as perplexing and ambiguous as ever. The article’s analysis of subjectivity is maybe an essential takeaway. Nagel emphasizes the subjective nature of subjective awareness, which is not represented by physical explanations of the mind or apparent behaviors. He criticizes the reductive materialist or physicalist view of the mind-body dilemma, which rejects the so-called divide between mind and brain. The mind-body conflict arises because individuals frequently subjectively believe that their intellect, with which they often connect the most, is something more than simply their structure of the brain. The materialist argues that the intellect and awareness are totally understandable by physical laws, thereby denying the separation among the design of the brain. This stance they support is known as naturalism, and it is opposed to materialism.

The arbitrary nature of perception for someone born blind or deaf is not available to someone given with perfectly functional senses, and conversely. So, before casting judgment on a specific individual or actions, keep in mind that you have not experienced their experience. Individuals will never really understand what it is like to be a bat or another human, no matter how much you envision it. The fictitious story just shows what it might be like for a person to transfer their mind into the skin of a bat. Because a person is not a bat by nature, they cannot have the consciousness of being a bat from conception. It also calls into question the feasibility of objectivity and reductionism, emphasizing the importance of individuality in subjective awareness. In other terms, the experience of the world as a bat, with all of its capabilities ranging from wingspan to acoustic hearing, is entirely separate from the experience of reality as a person, with all of its distinctive physicochemical properties.

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StudyCorgi. "“What Is Like to Be a Bat” by Thomas Nagel." December 28, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/what-is-like-to-be-a-bat-by-thomas-nagel/.

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StudyCorgi. 2022. "“What Is Like to Be a Bat” by Thomas Nagel." December 28, 2022. https://studycorgi.com/what-is-like-to-be-a-bat-by-thomas-nagel/.

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