Thomas Nagel asked what being a bat feels like, and physics couldn't answer
In a 1974 essay, Thomas Nagel argued that no amount of physical description can capture what it is like to be a bat, or anyone. Consciousness, he said, is defined by that inner point of view, and science's view from nowhere leaves it out by design, however accurate it otherwise is.
Nagel was born on 4 July 1937 in Belgrade to German Jewish refugee parents, reached the United States in 1939 and grew up secular in New York. He meant to study physics at Cornell but switched to philosophy, then went to Oxford on a Fulbright, becoming one of the last students of J. L. Austin. At Harvard he wrote a doctorate on altruism under John Rawls, whom he later called the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century, and helped edit early drafts of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. He taught at Berkeley and then Princeton until 1980, co-founded the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy with Robert Nozick in 1967, and later became a professor of philosophy and law at New York University.
The bat essay's core claim is that an organism has conscious states only if there is something it is like to be that organism, for the organism itself. The famous question was not his own invention; Timothy Sprigge asked it first. Nagel's point is that physics describes the world in terms that do not depend on any particular observer, such as mass and shape, and that is its strength. But a mind simply is a particular standpoint, so an account that abstracts away from standpoints leaves out exactly what needed explaining. Critics call this dualism, yet Nagel frames it as a claim about concepts: you grasp mental concepts only by being acquainted with your own mind, while physical concepts carry no such requirement.
He does not doubt that science describes a real, independent world. What he rejects is the assumption that the most objective account is always the best one, and he thinks philosophers dazzled by physics produce falsely objectifying theories of mind. As a rationalist he expects a future revolution that will show how one underlying stuff necessarily yields both mental and physical properties; the current sense of an unbridgeable gap marks only where understanding stands today.
He pressed the argument further in Mind and Cosmos in 2012, challenging the neo-Darwinian account of how consciousness emerged. His honours include the Rolf Schock and Balzan prizes, both in 2008.
Source: Thomas Nagel
