Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
—Thomas Nagel
Preparation
Required reading: Nagel, T., 1974. What is it like to be a bat?. The philosophical review, 83(4), pp.435-450. (90 mins).
If you find this reading difficult to understand, please watch the video Tips For Reading Philosophy by Ellie Anderson (15 min).
Overview
Nagel’s essay is concerned with the many “implausible accounts of the mental” that, in his opinion, side-step phenomenological aspects of subjective experience.
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction. But … what makes the mind-body problem unique … is ignored.
As Sartre before him, Nagel distinguishes between the pour-soi (being-for-itself, subjective) and en-soi (being-in-itself, objective). Any reductionism that claims to account for mental without accounting for subjective experience is beside the point.
On a first reading one might think that Nagel’s concern is the problem of qualia.
“If physicalism [materialism] is to be defended, the phenomenological features [of experience] must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character it seems that such a result is impossible.”
In philosophy, qualia refers to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin meaning “of what sort” or “of what kind” in a specific instance like “what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now” (from Wikipedia).
But it isn’t qualia — i.e., the subjective character of experience — that most concerns Nagel. Rather, it is that “…the facts of experience — facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism — are accessible only from one point of view [i.e., the point of view of that type of organism].” Because a physical theory will inevitably abandon that point of view as it attempts to be more objective, it is unclear how the true character of subjective experience could be revealed by an analysis of the physical operation of an organisms nervous system.
Amiel Bernal summarizes Nagel’s argument as follows.
(1) There is a fact of the matter regarding “what it is like” to be a bat.
(2) This fact can not be known objectively (i.e., characterized in inter-subjective terms as we normally do in scientific work)
(3) Thus this fact can only be known subjectively (in first person terms).
Conclusions:
(C1) This fact is non-reducible.
(C2) This fact is non-knowable to non-bats.
Video for in-class discussion (not required before class)
In the video below Amiel Bernal summarizes Nagel’s argument. Please watch 1:55 – 10:40, in which Bernal review of key terms such as physicalism, reductionism and phenomenology.
Recommended reading (when convenient)
The Dictionary of Cognitive Science is a great resource [SWEM Online] [Readings]. At this point, I recommend reading the entries for Turing Machine, Reductionism, and Representation. Notice the differences between the meaning of “representation” in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy.
Further reading and resources (not required)
The video below is the fourth in Richard Brown’s course Introduction to the Philosophical Study of the Mind (LaGuardia Community College). Watch from 14:15 to 22:10 (8 minutes) where Brown discusses our Nagel’s essay and the explanatory gap.
Computational Neuroscience 