Does Batman Know Thomas Nagel?

Can Batman Really Know what it is like to be a Bat?

          In ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel argues that any attempt to reduce the mind to a physical description will ultimately fail because: a) consciousness remains a mystery and is a feature of the mind, b) the subjective qualitative experience of consciousness is only available to those who experience it; all the concepts/words one could use to describe someone else’s subjective qualitative experience would be derivative from their own experience (therefore not giving a good representation of the phenomenological aspects of the experience one is trying to describe), and c) that while reducing other phenomena (light, water, fire etc) gets one closer to objectivity, reducing the mind does the opposite.  This essay will outline Nagel’s argument for the irreducibility of the mind, while also unpacking the larger themes which call the meaning of any reductionist account into question.

The first argument Nagel presents is an a priori argument concerning the nature of reduction.  Reduction is the process in which one takes a phenomenon and reduces it to the components that bring about that phenomenon. If one were to reduce the phenomenon of water for instance, one would analyse all of the components of which water is composed and define water by the relations amongst those simpler elements.  This article is essentially Nagel’s attempt at criticizing the application of this method to consciousness.  Reduction (arguably) works with water because all aspects of water (H2O) are known and reducible.  However, insofar as the mind has one aspect which is a relative unknown, any attempt at reducing it will be incomplete; a system is reducible if and only if all aspects of it are known and reducible. The notion of reducibility fails a priori if consciousness is irreducible.

But why is the mind inherently irreducible?  According to Nagel, there is an experience unique to every conscious being; a feeling of what it is like for that thing to be that thing.  Drawing on the nature of the experience of a bat, Nagel attempts to show that ‘(w)ithout some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of a bats experience is, we cannot know what is required of a physicalist theory (pg. 437).’ The idea is that, in order to reduce something to its parts, one must possess an idea of what it is that needs to be reduced.  Because a key aspect of a bats experience remains a mystery, namely what it is like to be that thing, any attempt at reduction will lack a fundamental feature of the subject which is willed to be reduced.  This example is meant to show that reductionist account will inevitably leave out a key feature of mind. 

The subjective qualitative experience of what it is like for a bat, or what Nagel calls the ‘phenomenological features’ (pg.437), is something only the bat holds epistemic dominion over.  If one were to attempt an understanding at what it is like to be a bat for instance, one might imagine what it is like to perceive the world through sonar, or to have wings and eat insects.  However, any mental construction one could create as an attempt to understand the subjective experience of what it is like to be a bat would be composed of bits of experience gathered from memory, and therefore would only be an attempt at describing an unknown experience in terms one was more familiar with.  For instance, if one states that a bat is using sonar to guide itself, one has no basis for making an informed claim about what it is like for the bat to guide itself through the world using sonar, so one uses his/her own imagination as an attempt to understand said experience.  This illustrates the issue with reducing consciousness, as it will always drive one to attempt an understanding of the phenomenological features of a system completely foreign to it, leaving one with the inherently inadequate tools of imagination and intuition. 

This does not mean we cannot say anything objective about the mind of a bat however. We could say that bats experience fear, pain and hunger.  However, we would: a) always be limited to our understanding of what those are based on our experience, and b) we would not be describing something about their subjective experience of what it is like for a bat to experience these states subjectively.  This reasoning can even apply between human beings.  For, I could never understand, as Nagel points out, what the experience of someone who has been blind from birth is like.  One could try to describe it, however Nagel argues that any attempt at describing the subjective character of experience will be an abstraction from it, and will inevitably make it lose it experiential nature.  That is why for instance Nagel claims reduction makes more sense with something like water than for something like experience; we do not lose anything fundamentally objective when we reduce water, however, with consciousness, we do in fact lose a key feature of it upon abstraction.     

While Nagel does doubt that one will ever transcend the limitations of external analysis of the subjective experience of consciousness, he proposes that science should adopt a phenomenological enterprise as a means to perhaps understand the a priori structures of the mind as an effort to construct the experience of something externally.  For instance, on page 439, Nagel describes how he restricted to the resources of his own mind when trying to understand the subjective experience of a bat.  More specifically, Nagel states ‘I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtraction and modifications’ (pg. 439).  So within the limited scope of the imagination, an understanding of the structure of experience seems impossible, and that is why it is desirable, and even necessary to develop an empirical and scientific basis for understanding experience.  If science can find ground the structure of experience empirically, perhaps one could create a working representation of the fundamental ‘what it is like to be’.  Perhaps one will reach this science of experience by virtue of the addition, subtraction and modification Nagel describes; if it is discovered that certain structures presuppose a certain kind of experience, then it seems that one could create representation of an experience through a manipulation of those structures.  This may be a potential solution to the subjective and objective problem as Nagel poses it.

In summation, Nagel’s article casts doubt on the application of the reductionist method to consciousness.  Because consciousness remains a mystery and it participates in the category of mind, the mind is also a mystery, making any attempt at reduction of the mind vacuous.  In order to ever gain an understanding of the mind, one must gain an understanding of the ‘phenomenological features’ of consciousness, which are only available to those who possess said consciousness.  The only way out of the mind/body problem, or even the mind/consciousness problem, is perhaps the phenomenological science Nagel proposes.   

Work Cited:

Nagel, Thomas. ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No.4 (Oct., 1974).  Pp. 435-450.