Month: September 2015

When thinking about the complex idea of consciousness in animals, Nagel focuses on bats. Bats ‘see’ and ‘hear’ in a completely different way than we do, although both populations have evolved very sophisticated perceptive mechanisms over time to suit their needs. Regardless of the this similar complexity, we, as humans, have no sense that is remotely similar to echolocation in bats and therefore cannot truly feel or understand what it is like to use that as a primary sense. I can think about what it would be like for me to be a bat- if I would enjoy it, how I would feel to be nearly blind, what it would be like to hang in a tree… but those are all based on my own experiences as a human. The fact that I am human allows me to understand the quality of another human’s experiences because we are sufficiently similar enough. I have nearly the same basic information processing systems and sensory mechanisms as another human being. We have language to describe our experiences to others and we are able to understand, to a certain extent, how it feels to go through that experience. On the other hand, there is no possible way for me to understand what it is like to be a bat; I can only discover what it is like for Amy Patterson, the human, to pretend to be a bat. Regardless of this lack of understanding, bats must have some sort of consciousness because there is something that it is like to be that organism, which is Nagel’s explanation for consciousness in all organisms.