mind & identity · new to this edition

what is it like to be a bat?

a bat finds a moth in the dark by listening to its own echoes. thomas nagel argued that you will never know what that is like, and that no science yet conceived could tell you.

after Thomas Nagel, Daniel Dennett, Kathleen Akins, Peter Hacker, Eric Schwitzgebel · about 5 minutes

In October 1974 the American philosopher Thomas Nagel published a short paper in The Philosophical Review with a question for a title: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Daniel Dennett, who disagreed with much of it, later called it the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness. It asks you to do something, notice that you cannot, and then decide what your failure shows. Answer each step before reading on. The first step commits you to a fact; the last asks who, if anyone, could ever know it.

is there something it is like to be this bat?

It is a summer evening. A small brown bat drops from the eaves of a barn and starts to hunt. Its eyes are poor, and the light is going. It does not need them. It sends out calls pitched too high for you to hear and reads the world from the echoes that come back: the wall, the hedge, and a moth fluttering a few metres ahead. It turns, closes and takes the moth in its mouth without slowing down.

Somewhere in its skull, the echoes are being turned into a sense of where things are.

Is there something it is like, for the bat, to be doing this?

is there something it is like to be this bat?

further reading