Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 78 of 138
What is it like to be a bat
One of the earliest well-known arguments against functionalist types of materialism was advanced in an article by Thomas Nagel called, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat?”1 According to Nagel, the really difficult part of the mind-body problem is the problem of consciousness. Suppose we had a fully satisfactory functionalist, materialist, neurobiological account of various mental states: beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc. All the same, such an account would not explain consciousness. Nagel illustrates this with the example of a bat. Bats have a different lifestyle from ours. They sleep all day long, hanging upside down from rafters, and then they fly around at night, navigating by detecting echoes from sonar they bounce off of solid objects. Now, says Nagel, someone might have a complete knowledge of a bat’s neurophysiology; he might have a complete knowledge of all the functional mechanisms that enable bats to live and navigate; but all the same, there would be something left out of this person’s knowledge: What is it like to be a bat? What does it feel like? And this is the essence of consciousness. For any conscious being, there is a what-it-is-like aspect to his existence. And this is left out of any objective account of consciousness because an objective account cannot explain the subjective character of consciousness.