“The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something chat it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism" wrote Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University in 1974.
“Tthe essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat- Now we know that most bats ... perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine.
“Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”
Nagel argues that the term 'consciousness' can have several meanings simple perception or attention ("She became conscious of a noise In the room"), awareness in general ("He regained consciousness"),or self-awareness or voluntariness ("Did you do it consciously?"). Point of view is more cognitve a phrase. Either way "You're stuck with the experience of what it's like to be a human being."
“The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.” Nagel believes Conscious experience is widespread throughout the animal kingdom and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. Science cannot truly understand consciousness, he says, because it requires objective, third person, observation, but first person consciousness can only bedefined through the experience of the individual him/her/itself.
It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness.”
Without some idea, therefore, of what the subjective charactheter of experience is, we cannot know what is required of a physicalist theory."
Posts
