Author: Anna Karnes

Nagel argues that, “the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.” He then lays out that this would mean there is something it is like to be a bat and asks you to imagine being that bat. From there he argues that you would never be able to answer that question because you are not a bat so you are limited by the restrictions of having human senses in so far as you cannot even fathom what the experience would be like for the bat. He takes it further by arguing that, “Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.” Nagel is considering this thought experiment with the motivation of answering the mind-body question. However, the main points he discusses are that even though some people may attempt to figure out how other animals’ minds work, we will never be able to truly connect to them on that level because there is simply too great of a distance between humans and animals. -Karnes