But can we ever know what it would really be like for a bat? As Nagel pointed
out, the question is not answered by trying to imagine that you are a bat. This
will not do. It is no good hanging upside down in a darkened room, making little
clicks with your tongue, and flapping your arms like wings. Perhaps, if you could
magically be transformed into a bat, you would know and could report back? But
no, even this won’t do. For if you were a bat, the bat in question would not be an
ordinary bat – what with having your memories and your interest in conscious-
ness. And if you stopped being yourself and became an ordinary bat, then this bat
would have no understanding of English and no ability to ask questions about
consciousness, and could not tell anyone else what it was like, even though it
might know for itself. So, we humans cannot know what it is like to be a bat, even
if we believe that there is something it is like.
Nagel’s question clarifies the central meaning of the term ‘consciousness’. This
is what the American philosopher Ned Block calls ‘phenomenal consciousness’,
P-consciousness, or phenomenality. He explains that ‘Phenomenal consciousness
is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is some-
thing “it is like” to be in that state’. He distinguishes this from ‘access conscious-
ness’ or A-consciousness, which is ‘availability for use in reasoning and rationally
guiding speech and action’ (1995, p. 227). Block asks ‘whether phenomenal con-
sciousness includes the cognitive accessibility underlying reportability’ (2007, p.
481). In other words, is the ability to say something about our experience inherent
to conscious experience, or can the experience and the access be separated out?
At first sight this distinction may seem unnecessary, for surely what we are trying
to understand is phenomenality, not access. Yet whenever we study phenome-
nality, we have to listen to what people say, or in other ways use their reports
of conscious experiences. It has even been suggested that reportability should
be part of our definition of consciousness: ‘it might be a good idea, chiefly for
pragmatic reasons, if the default meaning of “consciousness” were to become
something like “reportable mental content” ’ (Nunn, 2009, pp. 7–8). This places
enormous significance on the role of language and the communicative context
in which language is used. But it also leads us to ask whether these accessible and
hence reportable ‘contents’ are all there is to consciousness, or whether we are
missing something crucial when we rely on this kind of testimony.
The intuition that there is more to phenomenal experience than can be accessed
and reported is easy to evoke. Look around you now and soak up the colours,
feelings, and sounds around you. Now try to describe them to yourself. You may
get the distinct feeling that there is a lot more in your conscious experience than
you can ever describe, or that the process of trying to capture your experiences
destroys them. You may feel that something gets lost whether you speak aloud
to others about your experiences, talk to yourself about them, or even only think
about them. One of the subsections of Block’s ‘access consciousness’ category is
‘reflective consciousness’ – that is, higher-order reflection about consciousness, or
thinking about thinking. Any kind of ‘access’, whether fully verbalised or not, can
leave us with the impression that we are only scratching the surface, or betraying
the reality as soon as we try to pin it down.
as though the abundance of the soul did not sometimes overflow
in the emptiest metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact
