Bringing Mind to Matter
T he American philosopher Thomas Nagel has been responsible for two of the most important contributions to the philosophy of mind in the twentieth century. Both have made understanding how minds fit into an overwhelmingly mindless universe more difficult.
The first was in a famous 1974 paper that asked the question, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel pointed out that most philosophers of mind had somehow, unaccountably, overlooked the defining features of minds: namely, that they are conscious, living in a world of felt sensations. Nagel’s paper helped bring into the mainstream the idea that an organism is conscious only if “there is something it is like to be that organism” — that is to say, if the creature has its own experience of the world. Whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a pebble, it is perfectly obvious that being a human — at least, a particular human being at a particular time — is like something, indeed like many things.
This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.
