What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 50 Years On

This week, we’re discussing one of the most famous papers in philosophy: Thomas Nagel’s 1974 classic, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Given how influential Nagel’s bat paper has been in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, it’s worth taking some time to understand it. So, this article starts a mini three-part series on Nagel’s ideas about bats. In Part 1 (that’s this article), we’ll focus on Nagel’s original bat paper. Next week, in Part 2, we’ll focus on how and why Nagel’s argument has been misinterpreted over the years. And in Part 3, we’ll take up Nagel’s invitation to explore the neuroscience behind human echolocation and ask whether it brings us any closer to knowing what it is like to be a bat.

Nagel asks can we ever truly know what it’s like to be a bat? And if not, what does that tell us about consciousness?

At its core, Nagel’s bat paper is an attack on physical reductionism — the idea that conscious experiences can be completely explained by physical processes in the brain.

He makes three main points to build this argument.

1. We can’t know what it is like to be a bat.

2. There’s a difference between the subjective and the objective.

3. Objective science can’t tell us what it is like to be a bat.

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