A quotation from Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel

1937 CE

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.

Nagel's short 1974 essay 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' has had a disproportionate afterlife for something so brief, because it isolated with unusual precision exactly what materialist theories of mind kept failing to explain. Bats navigate their world by echolocation, a sensory mode nothing like human vision or hearing, and Nagel's point was not really about bats at all: however completely science eventually describes a bat's neurons, its echolocation apparatus, and its behavior from an objective, third-person standpoint, something is left out: the subjective, first-person fact of what it is actually like to be that creature having that experience, a fact seemingly inaccessible from outside no matter how much objective data accumulates. He generalized this tension into The View from Nowhere, arguing that the entire history of philosophy can be read as an oscillation between the objective standpoint, which is essential for real knowledge and yet strips out exactly the subjective perspective that makes a life feel like anything at all, and the subjective standpoint, which captures that felt quality but resists full translation into impersonal, objective terms: with ethics, personal identity, and the problem of consciousness all exhibiting versions of the identical structural puzzle. Decades later, David Chalmers would build directly on Nagel's insight in formulating what he called the hard problem of consciousness, and Nagel is now routinely credited as the philosopher who first showed, rather than merely asserted, why subjective experience resists reduction to any purely physical account. Late in his career he provoked a genuinely fierce controversy with Mind and Cosmos, arguing that standard neo-Darwinian materialism, while broadly correct about evolution, is very unlikely to be the whole story when it comes to explaining the emergence of consciousness, meaning, and value: a claim, more careful and more limited than his critics often represented it, that nonetheless drew scorn from scientists and fellow philosophers alike and remains one of the more contested late-career interventions in recent philosophy.