What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
The subjective character of experience
First published: T. Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", *Philosophical Review* 83 (1974): 435–450.
Bats navigate by echolocation. Even given a complete physical description, we cannot know what it is *like* to be one.
Nagel argues that consciousness has an irreducibly subjective character: there is something it is like to be a conscious organism, and that "what-it-is-likeness" cannot be captured by objective, third-person scientific description. Bats, with their alien sensory apparatus (echolocation), make the point sharply — no amount of physical detail tells us what bat experience is like from the inside. The paper, together with Mary's Room and the explanatory gap, is foundational for contemporary anti-physicalist arguments and for the "hard problem" of consciousness.
Formulation
Subjective character of experience = what it is like for the organism. Objective description = third-personal physical/functional account. Claim: there is no path from the latter to the former, even in principle. Bats are useful because their experience is sufficiently alien.
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Targets Observer · Physicality: is the qualitative character of experience exhaustively physical?
Matter
Bears on Matter · Ontological Status: a complete physical description may leave a what-it-is-like residue.
Responses — How Schools Engage
Affirms / takes the bait 3
A foundational text: subjective character is a further fact about reality, not reducible to physical description.
Compatible: subjective character is fundamental, distributed; the bat's experience differs in detail but not in basic ontological status.
A canonical analytic statement of what phenomenology has always insisted: first-person experience is constitutive, not derivative.
Denies / rejects the premise 2
Physicalists (Dennett, Lewis): "what it is like" is itself a functional/representational state amenable to scientific account. The intuition is misleading.
If "what it is like" is unstateable in observation language, the claim it points to is, by the verification criterion, empirically empty.
Holds it inconclusive 1
A live foundation for the hard-problem literature; alongside Mary's Room and zombies, it shapes contemporary philosophy of mind.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaged by an overlapping set of schools — likely to surface the same fault lines.
Further reading
- Nagel (1974), op. cit.
- Nagel, *The View from Nowhere* (1986)
Related Historical Debates
Debates that share dimensions and/or aligned schools with this experiment.
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Works Most Aligned With This Experiment
Ranked by total declared-influence weight in the schools that respond to this experiment.
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