Being In A Bat's Wings

Questions on Consciousness and Human Limitations

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a bat?

You have? Why?

Why do you have so much time on your hands?

Well, judgement aside, you are not alone in thinking about what it would be like to be a bat.

There was another, much like you, who wondered the same thing.

Thomas Nagel, a famous American Philosopher, published a paper in 1974 titled “What is it like to be a Bat?”

Thomas Nagel

He didn’t do it because he had too much time on his hands (maybe he did, I don’t know. He was going through a divorce at the time. A divorce can make people think about all kinds of things)

Digression aside,

Officially, the paper is considered one of the most influential thought experiments into the nature of consciousness and how much psychologists and neurologists can truly understand it.

The Thought Experiment

The experiment goes something like this.

Imagine what it would be like to be a bat.

That’s it!

It might not seem too complicated but actually think about what would it be like to actually be a bat.

Nagel chose bats for a specific reason. They are mammals like us. They take care of their young ones but still, they are distinctively different from us. As Nagel said, anyone who has been locked in a room with an excited bat knows what it’s like to be in the presence of an alien life form.

Their limbs are adapted to form wings with interwebs between the fingers. They use sonar sensations to perceive the world around them.

Now think of what it would be like to BE a bat.

Can we ever truly answer that with accuracy?

Look at it this way.

If you were to imagine your arms turning to wings, your feet turning to claws and your sensations relying on echolocation only, you will still be imagining what it would be like FOR YOU to be a bat.

You would still have no answer on what it would be like to be a bat for the bat itself.

And that’s the point Nagel is trying to make.

We may never know what it is to have the subjective conscious experience of being something or maybe even someone else.

And trying to do so may be a futile exercise borne out of human arrogance in what we can truly know and understand.

Its funny isn’t it?

We can see what the black hole at the centre of our galaxy looks like. We can measure how much it weighs and how it works.

But we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, or a dog, or even another human being (not with 100% accuracy)

This leads us to the second point that Nagel is trying to make.

The Subjective and Objective

Imagine tomorrow an alien species visits Earth and tries to understand what it is like to be a human.

What would they find? And how would they find it out?

They will eventually hone in on the brain as the centre of the human experience. They will dissect it, test it and see which part leads to what sensation but will that be all there is to it?

Will the collection of neurons in our brains ever be able to describe and encompass the diversity and richness of human subjective conscious experience?

You know how you have this sense that there is a “you” apart from your body and your brain and all the nerves in it.

There is a sense of “I”ness in your actions. When you are thirsty you don’t think, “My brain is sending signals to my body to seek out water”

You simply think, “I want water.”

That is consciousness. It is the what makes psychology so much fun and also so frustrating.

How do you study consciousness?

This is where the topic of subjectivity and objectivity in human consciousness takes centre stage.

When we try to objectively understand the subjective experiences of a person (the things they feel when eating a fruit, the redness of the sky they see) we paradoxically lose the subjectivity of their experience.

The human experience proposes such a paradox. A paradox that psychology and philosophy have been grappling with for centuries.

How do we understand something that is inherently subjective, objectively?

Neuroscientists don’t have to face this problem because they rule out the subjectivity of conscious experience. For them, it is all about the brain and its mechanism. Consciousness is merely a side-effect of these mechanisms.

Nagel believed that neuroscience cannot run away from this problem forever. Mind you, at his time fMRI had not become the norm they are today. He believed a purely physical explanation of consciousness may never be possible but we should be open to its possibility.

Almost 50 years on from the paper being published, we are still nowhere close to knowing what gives rise to consciousness. Even worse, we still don’t know what it would be like to be a bat :(

The question still stands though, what else can a human being come up with when going through a divorce? We may never truly know. Consciousness seems to be an easier problem.

---

Question of the Week!

What would you do if you woke up tomorrow as a bat? No, any references to The Metamorphosis by Kafka will not be entertained.

---

Personal Corner

It was international Men’s Day on 19 November and I did something scary by talking to strangers at a market about men’s mental health. It was quite something. Men’s mental health has always been an important topic for me and this was probably the first time I talked about it in such a public place.

May there be more conversations on it in the future! And if there are, I will be there for them :)

What is a topic close to your heart?

You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments

Until next time,

Arjun

🛣✒🎯