What is it like to be a bat?

IMHO the phrasing here is essential to the argument and this phrasing contains a fundamental error. In valid usage we only say that two things are like one another when they are also separate things. The usage here (which is cleverly hidden in some tortured language) implies that there is a "thing" that is "like" "being the organism", yet is distinct from "being the organism". This is false - there is only "being the organism", there is no second "thing that is like being the organism" not even for the organism itself.

If you don't believe that, then you face the challenge of describing what the difference is. It's difficult to do in ordinary language.

That's what Nagel is attempting to do. Unless you're an eliminativist who believes that conscious experience is an "illusion" (experienced by what?), then you're just quibbling about wording, and I suspect you'll have a difficult time coming up with better wording yourself.

That's exactly what I'm saying is erroneous. Consciousness is the first thing, we are only led to believe it is a separate, second thing by a millenia-old legacy of dualism and certain built-in tendencies of mind.

I also don't think it's fair to say I'm just quibbling about wording. Yes, I am quibbling about wording, but the quibble is quite essential because the argument depends to such a large extent on wording. There are many other arguments for or against different views of consciousness but they are not the argument Nagel makes.

(Though fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears" and a far cry from "consciousness doesn't exist at all")

"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states

"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states

Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"

edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)

> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.

Because they are trying to discuss a difficult-to-define concept - consciousness.

The difficulty and nebulousness is intrinsic to the subject, especially when trying to discuss in scientific terms.

To dismiss their attempts so, you have to counter with a crystal, unarguable description of what consciousness actually is.

Which of course, you cannot do, as there is no such agreed description.

Certainly. I just didn't know where you stood on the question.

In Nagel's terms, there is not something it is like to be a game of Tetris. A game of Tetris doesn't have experiences. "Something it is like" is an attempt to characterize the aspect of consciousness that's proved most difficult to explain - what Chalmers dubbed the hard problem.

How would you describe the distinction?

> fwiw I do think consciousness has some illusory aspects - which is only saying so much as "consciousness is different than it appears"

Oh sure, I think that's widely accepted.

I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.

>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?

No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.

The Oxford Living Dictionary defines consciousness as "[t]he state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings", "[a] person's awareness or perception of something", and "[t]he fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world".

In translations to Spanish, the article is titled "¿Qué se siente ser un murciélago?", literal word by word translation "What is felt being a bat?"

In French, "Quel effet cela fait-il d'être une chauve-souris?", literal word by word translation "What effect it makes to be a bat?"

In Chinese, "成为一只蝙蝠可能是什么样子", i.e., "To become a bat could be what feeling/sensation?"

None of these translations has a comparative word. And at least in Spanish (I won't speak about the other two because I'm not so proficient in them), using a comparative expression similar to "being like" in English ("¿A qué se parece ser un murciélago?") would sound awkward and not really convey the point. Which is why the translators didn't do so.

Of course I know that the original article is in English, but I think the author basically meant "What is felt being a bat?" and just used the "like" construction because it's what you say in English for that to sound good and clear. Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.

Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that its impossible to know.

As for whether I agree with Nagle, I find him consistently just wrong enough to be irritating in ways that I want to work out my thoughts in response to, which by some standards can be counted as a compliment. As much as I understand the turn of phrase and its ability to get people to grasp the idea, and I at least respect it for that reason, I kind of sort of always have the impression that this is what everyone meant the entire time and wouldn't have thought a whole essay emphasizing the point was necessary.

[0] https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/the-feeling-of-what-happens/

The tricky bit is that “to be” is not an ordinary verb like fly, eat, or echo-locate. And “‘being an organism’” is — in the context of the paper — about subjective experience (subjective to everything except the organism.

To put it another way, the language game Nagel plays follows the conventions of language games played in post-war English language analytic philosophy. One of those conventions is awareness of Wittgenstein’s “philosophical problem”: language is a context sensitive agreement within a community…

…sure you may find fault with Wittgenstein and often there are uncomfortable epistemological implications for Modernists, Aristotelians, Positivists and such…then again that’s true of Kant.

Anyway, what the language-game model gives philosophical discourse is a way of dealing with or better avoiding Carnapian psuedo-problems arising from an insistence that the use of a word in one context applies to a context where the word is used differently…Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World pre-dates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations by about 25 years.

Ordinary materialism is mind-body/soul-substance subjectivity with a hat and lipstick.

I do mostly agree with that and I think that they collectively give analytic philosophy a bad name. The worst I can say for Nagel in this particular case though is that the whole entire argument amounts to, at best, an evocative variation of a familiar idea presented as though it's a revelatory introduction of a novel concept. But I don't think he's hiding an untruth behind equivocations, at least not in this case.

But more generally, I would say I couldn't agree more when it comes to the names you listed. Analytic philosophy ended up being almost completely irrelevant to the necessary conceptual breakthroughs that brought us LLMs, a critical missed opportunity for philosophy to be the field that germinates new branches of science, and a sign that a non-trivial portion of its leading lights are just dithering.

Indeed! Makes you think: maybe it's a bug rather than a feature.

How do you know that?

Philosophically, of course.

I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.

Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.

The question is not "What would it be like (i.e. be similar to) to be a bat?" which seems to be the strawman you are responding to.

I find myself believing in Idealism or monism to be the fundamental likelihood

Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like:

(1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing)

(2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1)

(3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition)

=> Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3)

> Just that all models, however useful are still models

Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.

I’d bet bats would enjoy marrow too if they could.

EDIT: removed LLM irrelevancy, improved formatting

If you claim there's no distinction, then in terms of the meaning Nagel is trying to convey, you're claiming there's no distinction that sets you apart from a game of Tetris in terms of consciousness.

That's where my first reply to you was coming from: if you believe the distinction Nagel is trying to convey doesn't exist, that's tantamount to saying that consciousness as a real phenomenon doesn't exist - the eliminativist position - or something along those lines.

If you do believe consciousness exists, then you're simply arguing with the way Nagel is choosing to characterize it. I asked how you would describe it, but you haven't tried to address that.

Why they focus on feelings is a different issue.

Consciousness is a characteristic of material/matter/substance/etc.

There are not two types of stuff.

It is epistemologically rigorous. And simple.

- I assume you as a materialist you mean our brain carries consciousness as a field of experience arising out of neural activity (ie neurons firing, some kind of infromation processing leading to models of reality simulated in our mind leading to ourselves feeling aware) ie that we our awareness is the 'software' running inside the wetware.

That's all well and good except that none of that explains the 'feeling of it' there is nothing in that 3rd person material activity that correlates with first person feeling. The two things, (reductionist physical processes cannot substitute for the feeling you and I have as we experience)

This hard problem is difficult to surmount physically -either you say its an illusion but how can the primary thing we are, we expereince as the self be an illusion? or you say that somewhere in fields, atoms, molecules, cells, in 'stuff; is the redness of red or the taste of chocolate..

Characterizing that distinction is surprisingly tricky. "What is it like to be..." is one way to do that. David Chalmers' article about "the hard problem of consciousness" is another: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

a materialist isn't saying that only material exists: no materialist denies that interesting stuff (behaviors, properties) emerges from material. in fact, "material" is a bit dated, since "stuff-type material" is an emergent property of quantum fields.

why is experience not just the behavior of a neural computer which has certain capabilities (such as remembering its history/identity, some amount of introspection, and of course embodiment and perception)? non-computer-programming philosophers may think there's something hard there, but they only way they can express it boils down to "I think my experience is special".

That is what is being discussed using the "what it's like" language.

It’s like explaining music vs hearing music

We can explain music intellectually and physically and mathematically

But hearing it in our awareness is a categorically different activity and it’s experience that has no direct correlation to the physical correlates of its being

The common thought experiment is the color blind researcher experiencing color for the first time(Mary the Colour Scientist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument)

Besides, I would not call "there is something it is like to be [...]" a "good and clear" construction. As mentioned on wikipedia, it has 'achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution"' - I don't think a specific locution would get special status if it was just any arbitrary way of pointing at what people already understand anyway (i.e. the concept "subjective experience").

>Your highlighted text could be rendered as "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that is felt being that organism – something that is felt by the organism." and it would be more precise, just doesn't sound elegant in English.

I agree these would be more or less equivalent, and I think your version is still making the same false distinction as Nagel's by positing a distinct "something". Only it does so (commendably) in a more clear and obvious way, thus it would never become the standard phrasing for people looking to sneak in dualist assumptions :)

You just did! Why would we need to rephrase this and then attach special importance to that new sentence construction, when "the distinction between objects that are conscious and objects that aren't" is perfectly adequate?

Certainly it's not claiming to define it, but it is making a claim about the existence of the "something", and also about the physical irreducibility of this "something".

I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's an effective way to codify a metaphysical intuition held by many people. That it would in any way constitute a proof for this intuition of course does not follow at all.

We're discussing a way of characterizing the nature of the conscious experience that you presumably have, that a game of Tetris doesn't.

The way Nagel would put this is that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" - i.e., you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

We can ask the question of you, "What is it like to be bondarchuk?" and you can answer based on your actual experience. You wouldn't just be generating text in response to a prompt the way an LLM would, you'd be describing your conscious experience of your existence. For example, you say you enjoy drinking a cup of coffee occasionally. That's a conscious experience that shows that there is something it is like to be you.

There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying. And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

By talking of a different "nature" you already place the discussion on dualist grounds.

>you have an experience of your existence that you can describe, because you're consciously aware of it.

Certainly. But the way Nagel phrases it, "the experience" becomes akin to a "thing", and the absence of this "thing" in physical nature becomes an argument for the hypothesis that it's highly unlikely (maybe even impossible) to give a physicalist account of consciousness. That is what I disagree with.

>There is, presumably, nothing it is like to be a Tetris game, because a Tetris game has no consciousness.

What does saying this get you over just saying "a Tetris game has no consciousness"?

>This is a standard, widely accepted characterization in consciousness studies. Even if you object to it, you should at least understand what it's saying.

I understand what it is saying only insofar as it is simply another way to say "consciousness". But it is clearly taken to be more than just an alternative phrase we can use in lieu of the words "consciousness" or "subjective experience" to vaguely gesture in the direction of these ill-defined concepts we are all familiar with. I disagree that "there is something it is like to be bondarchuk" has greater descriptory power than "bondarchuk is conscious", therefore I don't think we should draw any conclusions regarding consciousness from this phrasing, especially the conclusion Nagel draws which is that consciousness is highly likely to be non-physical or at least that our current understanding of "the physical" is insufficient to ever approach the problem of consciousness (because we can never hope to give proper account of "the something that it is like to be bondarchuk").

>And if you do object to it, the onus is on you to provide a better description, which I note you've declined to do on multiple occasions now.

Not really; my rejection of Nagel's argument can stand on its own regardless of whether I can offer an alternative argument.