Thomas Nagel - What Is It Like to Be a Bat? [Philosophy Audiobook]
2020 ж. 19 Мау.
22 271 Рет қаралды
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Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a Bat.” The Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435-450.
Text: warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/i...
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As someone who has trouble focusing on reading, finding this audiobook was a huge relief. Thanks!
Great voice. Thank you.
Thanks for making the vid!
In my view,it is impossible to know what it is like to be another human being. All we do is deluding ourselves into thinking that we know what it is like to be another person based on what we know about the other person. There is an inner universe inside any of us that will never be available to the outside world. Hence, a fortiori, it is impossible to know what to be a bat feels like. " No one knows what it is like to be a bad man...". A song provides the answer.
just saved me. i have an essay on this due at 11:59 and didn't feel like reading
I wish you the best of luck!
made me fall asleep extremely quick 10/10
Thanks man
Amazing
thank you
Can't reduce consciousness to a feature list
excellent
Didn't Kafka do a pretty good job of imagining what's like to be a roach?
Love the commercials
Of course. But since Freud we know that humans have also an unconscious. Só it is fundamental to complete all this, in order to understand subjectivity, which is always singular. So it is why Freud and Lacan are so important, crucially important. Yes, conscious + unconscious. Subjectivity in different in each human individual. That makes all the difference. Without that, you do not go to the core of the problem.
What it's like to be gay i could never be like that, Dahmer style.
Who performed this reading?
It's just me. My name is Christian, and I enjoy listening to audiobooks. I think I'm an auditory learner, and when I was doing my degree, I remember wishing that I could listen to the articles. So, I figured I'd start doing just that, and hopefully help out others who feel the same way. I hope this makes academic philosophy a bit more accessible to people. I think it would be really cool to expand, maybe even have other volunteers read and submit their recordings. For now though, it's just me in my room.
Great job! Very professional. Thank you for this.
Very appreciated
@@echobook8513 Hello, I am the same way. I tend to understand things better by listening rather than reading, and while studying philosophy at university I too have often wished that I could listen to articles rather than read them. I have sometimes used automatic text-to-audio programs to listen to my readings but the voice is usually so robotic and lacks the kind of nuance, emotion and emphasis that a human reader could give that would help communicate the material more fully. I have my own microphone, so I would love to do recordings of some famous philosophy articles to contribute to your project of making philosophy more accessible to people, if that's something you're still interested in doing.
@@Spideysenses67 I'm glad to hear it! DM me an email address where I can reach you and we can set something up.
Nagel's argument is deceptive: bats are animals, and since we,too, are animals, we are obviously able to imagine a very large chunk of a "batty" experience. Bats like us experience pain and pleasure, to name but one common experience. Why insist on the radar system that bats possess? Why compare human consciousness with that of bats focusing precisely on that characteristic? Don't we also experience great difficulty in imagining the life of any human being insofar as he possesses an experience that we don't? Can you imagine being a psychopath, queen Cleopatra or a great mathematician (if you are not gifted for mathematics)? For that matter, it is even very hard for us to imagine what it was like for us to be a baby or a child! But people write biographies of Egyptian queens and pharaohs; old people write memoirs in which they describe their childhood. And the reason why we can talk in the first place about the radar system of bats is because we, too, have radars. Now I am ready to admit that historians need imagination to write good biographies, but engineers don't need imagination so much to devise radars. Therefore to define consciousness in terms of feeling or imagination is a reductionist approach that doesn't resist even a superficial scrutiny of the facts. Human beings have reason. They form concepts, and if our radars, like the radar of bats, work very well, it's because our concepts correspond to the world, no matter what Kant and other philosophers may claim about their imaginary "things-in-themselves".
Of course, radar is electromagnetic radiation, and bats use sound vibrations, sonar. There seems to be some confusion here. Apart from being waves, they are fundamentally different.
With all due respect, perhaps, you are missing the point. The paper is a critique of reductionism as a valid epistemology of science often claimed by reductionists to be the only valid way to explore and know Nature in an objective way. The gist of Nagel's critique with this autocratic position (it's philosophy of science, we don't know) is that scientific materialism has a huge blind spot when it labels qualia an 'epiphenomenom', basically an event that is unrelated to the real business of figuring out how biology really works, like a distraction. But Nagel refutes this notion by pointing out to the fanatical physicalists that their reductionist method may be able to explain just about everything about a bat, but that they are leaving something huge out that makes their knowledge building fundamentally incomplete. Thus, 'what's it like to be a bat?', which reinvigorated the whole philosophical debate about the role of qualia in nature. Because no matter how complete the description on that bat, reductionism does not know qualia, therefore, does not have the complete story of Nature - or a bat.
@@junanougues well put
@@junanouguesI feel like this is related to emergence in systems theory, it's not possible to reduce conscious experience down in such away without destroying the system that brings it about. Secondary to that, experience is always going to be virtual, in the same way the images in a computer game don't have direct relation to the hardware without a huge amount of intermediaries and translation of those initial electrical signals themselves requiring hardware at base. Translation on top of translation on top of further translation. Studying the electrons fired through the wires and chips isn't going to tell you anything about how to get to the next level on Super Mario Bros. for example.
@gwyddionflint Consciousness is a deep biologic mystery and, possibly, fundamental to physics, also. It is silly to think we are uniquely experiencing it. If it's just biology, then it's a new thing in the history of life. But one suspects the spark was there from the beginning in the particle world, in one form or another, and, yes, probably related to emergent systems.
re a person deaf and blind from birth --- what about Helen Keller?
I wrote a little about Helen Keller, in my comment. She’s probably the best example of what it’s like to be a human bat and eventually joining the colony of human bats. I included her teacher, Annie Sullivan, who Helen simply called Teacher, in my comment. I’m so interested in Helen Keller that I read quite a bit about both her and Anne Sullivan in my youth. *WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT* reignited my interest, so I bought her autobiography, *THE STORY OF MY LIFE,* and am listening to it now. Audible also has a 5-minute recording of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller speaking. WOW!
re the butterfly ex at end -- all children would view the caterpillar and butterfly as the same. fact.
Word salad
Old philosophers were better.. Mfs would think something was true and just say it, without worrying about the “scientific community”. This is a snooze fest