What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Traced back to ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophy, the mind-body problem is a foundational concern in philosophy. It seeks to understand how mental states, which seem immaterial and subjective, interact with or relate to the physical body and the world. Nagel’s essay critiques various philosophical theories that address the mind-body problem.

Materialism (or physicalism), behaviorism, functionalism, and reductionism are prominent theories that attempt to explain the mind-body problem. Materialism, associated with philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi, posits that everything, including consciousness, can be explained by physical entities and their interactions. Behaviorism, associated with B. F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov and dominant in the mid-20th century, emphasizes the importance of observable behavior and environmental factors in shaping mental states. Functionalism, originating with the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim, suggests that mental states can be understood in terms of their functional roles within a system. Reductionism, originating with the philosopher Thales, argues that complex mental phenomena can be reduced to simpler components grounded in physical processes.

Nagel’s essay critiques these theories by emphasizing the nature of subjective experience, suggesting that consciousness and mental states cannot be fully understood through these approaches. His thought experiment about what it is like to be a bat underscores the difficulty of understanding subjective experience only in physical terms.

Nagel’s work continues the philosophical tradition that includes thinkers like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, who grappled with the nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mental and the physical. Descartes’s dualism, which posited a fundamental distinction between the mind and body, was an influential starting point for debates on the mind-body problem. However, Nagel’s exploration of the subjective character of experience rejects the established mind-body dichotomy, suggesting that consciousness cannot be neatly separated from the physical world. Instead, Nagel’s critique of reductionism echoes Kant, who emphasized the limitations of human understanding and argued that mental and physical experiences are all part of the world as it appears to us, thus acknowledging the unknowable nature of the underlying reality.

Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” can be situated within the broader philosophical discourse on the mind-body problem, as it engages with and critiques materialist, behaviorist, functionalist, and reductionist approaches. By addressing the limitations of these theories in accounting for the subjective nature of experience, Nagel’s essay contributes to the historical and ongoing discourse on consciousness, building on the ideas of influential philosophers and challenging prevailing theories.