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He asked what it is like to be a bat, and argued that no matter how much you learn about a bat's brain from the outside, you will never capture the one thing that matters most: what the experience feels like from within.
He named the hard problem of consciousness — why physical processes feel like anything at all — and no one has solved it yet.
Connection
Thomas Nagel the bat argument becomes the hard problem David Chalmers — Chalmers built directly on Nagel's bat argument in formulating the hard problem of consciousness, crediting Nagel as the philosopher who first showed, rather than merely asserted, why subjective experience resists reduction to physical description.
Ideas
Words
“An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.”
“The view from nowhere is a philosopher's fiction... but it is also the essential ideal underlying the pursuit of objective knowledge.”
“Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious aspect of our lives.”
“Why does the performance of these functions feel like something from the inside?”
Key Moments
1974
Publishes 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?'
2012
Publishes Mind and Cosmos
1994
Names the hard problem of consciousness
2004
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
Works
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
The Conscious Mind