CHAPTER

What is it like to be.. .?

tWo

BEING A...

What is it like to be a bat? This is one of the most famous questions ever asked in

the history of consciousness studies. It came to prominence in a 1974 paper of the

same name by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel. He argued that under-

standing how mental states can be neurons firing inside the brain is a problem

quite unlike understanding how water can be H 2 O, or how genes can be DNA.

‘Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable’, he said

(1974, p. 435; 1979, p. 165), and by consciousness he meant subjectivity. To make

this clear he asked, ‘what is it like to be a bat?’

Do you think that your cat is conscious? Or the birds outside in the street? Per-

haps you believe that horses are conscious but not worms, or living creatures but

not stones. We shall return to these questions (in Section Four), but here let us

consider what it means to say that another creature is conscious. If you say that

the stone is not conscious you probably mean that it has no experiences and no

point of view; that there is nothing it is like to be the stone. If you believe that

your neighbour’s new kitten, or the woodlouse you narrowly avoided crunching

underfoot, is conscious, then you probably mean that they do have a point of

view; there is something it is like to be them.

As Nagel put it, when we say that another organism is conscious we mean that

‘there is something it is like to be that organism [. . .] something it is like for the

organism’ (1974, p. 436); ‘the essence of the belief that bats have experience is

that there is something that it is like to be a bat’ (1974, p. 438). There is currently

no agreement over how to define consciousness (Dietrich, 2007; Nunn, 2009;