This document discusses Thomas Nagel's argument against deductive physicalism from his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?". Nagel argues that consciousness and subjective experience cannot be fully explained by physicalism based on our limited ability to understand what it is like to have a subjective experience different than our own, such as what it is like to be a bat. The document also considers potential objections to Nagel's argument, and responses showing why his argument remains valid.

1. NicolasArrisola
PHL 323M
Montague
10/11/14
Why Nagel Is Right
The mind-body problem, ever since its alleged inception attributed to Descartes, has been
a hot topic of debate in both the scientific and philosophic communities. It poses a metaphysical
quandary concerning the relationship between the mind and the physical body it inhabits, a
quandary that philosopher Thomas Nagel seeks to rectify when he asserts that “we have at
present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of mental phenomenon
would be” (Nagel 219, Philosophy of Mind). In this essay I will provide Nagel’s argument (from
his article What Is It Like to Be a Bat?) against deductive physicalism, some fairly sound
physicalist objections to this argument, and a counter-objection that will test the validity of these
objections all for the purpose of showing why Nagel’s argument is tenable or, at the very least,
profound and worthy of consideration.
Before we dive into the rhetoric, however, I will first define some terms I will be using
throughout the paper for the sake of clarity:
 Consciousness here will mean the inherent awareness present in sentient beings.
 Subjective is the combination of experiences, perspectives, and feelings within a sentient
being’s self (the subject); mental things.
 Objective is what is considered reality or truth free from a subject’s individual biases
(their feelings, interpretations, etc.); physical things.
 Subjective experience is the capacity for sentient beings to perceive and to feel with
respect to the self (as opposed to an objective account).

2. NicolasArrisola
PHL 323M
Montague
10/11/14
 Physicalism is the ontological monist theory that “everything is physical” (does not
account for the subjective).
Thomas Nagel argues that consciousness and subjective experience cannot be explained
with our contemporary understanding of physicalism (namely, deductive physicalism). He
believes that in order to truly understand consciousness, we must first understand what it is like
to be an organism. While it is true that one may be having an experience of being an organism at
this very moment, Nagel stresses that the human condition is merely a type of organism
experience as opposed to the very essence of being an organism. From this line of thought, Nagel
transitions into his bat example: Assuming that a bat is capable of experience, and given that a
bat uses a radically different method to perceive the external world (sonar/echolocation) when
compared to our own, it seems very difficult to imagine what it’s actually like to be a bat. Even if
one were to achieve this by some remarkable stretch of the imagination, it would only result in
an experience for that person to behave as a bat behaves; Nagel says that we must know what it’s
like for a bat to be a bat. Since there appears to be no clear way of addressing this metaphysical
problem (insofar as our understanding of modern science goes), Nagel concludes that as of yet
we are unable to understand the essence of what it is to be an organism, and thus we are unable
to explain consciousness with current deductive physicalist methods. It should be noted that
Nagel isn’t trying to disprove physicalism with this argument; he’s merely stating that modern
science has the wrong approach in dealing with the subjective. Modern science strives for
objectivity and a way of explaining the material world through it, but when faced with this task
of explaining subjectivity (i.e. a point of view or experience), it can only manage to be
dismissive of it.

3. NicolasArrisola
PHL 323M
Montague
10/11/14
A simple but potentially effective objection to Nagel’s argument would be if someone
were to actually find a way to experience exactly what a bat experiences…as a bat. Perhaps in
the far future, a machine is created that has the capacity to completely fuse a human
consciousness with a bat’s consciousness to the point where the human is able to experience
what it’s like to be a bat as a bat perfectly. Since this feat would no doubt have been achieved
through advances in science (i.e. deductive physicalism), it could be reasoned that Nagel’s bat
argument would fall through. Another objection against Nagel could be that what he’s doing in
the bat example is essentially comparing apples to oranges; his focus on the human mind and its
incapability of comprehending the experiential mechanisms of bats can be construed as being
unfair to human mental faculty. Proponents of this objection would probably stress the triviality
of such a comparison and how Nagel infers a false claim about the world from an erroneous
attempt at explaining how one views the world.
Despite its clever proposition, the first of these objections can be answered quite simply:
even given that sometime far in the future we are able to build a machine capable of perfectly
merging the consciousness of a person and a bat, it still wouldn’t give us an explanation of what
consciousness is like; we would understand a different perspective/type of being, but the nature
of subjective experience would still remain a mystery. This is further supported by Nagel in his
article when he writes that “if the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only
from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity – that is, less attachment to a specific
viewpoint – does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away
from it” (Nagel 223, Philosophy of Mind). As for the second objection, instead of a bat, what
about the case of a person blind and deaf from birth? Surely their conscious experience is a far

4. NicolasArrisola
PHL 323M
Montague
10/11/14
cry from an able-bodied person’s experience. Even if one were to perfectly imagine the complete
lack of sight and hearing, it would still be in a context relative to their able-bodied experience;
the deafblind’s subjective experience is in a league all its own. And now, I will posit an example
that I believe will also uphold the credibility of Nagel’s argument: If I were to be shown an
exquisite Renaissance painting, I could easily identify its objective qualities with respect to
deductive physicalism: shape, size, the media it’s presented on, the materials used to create it,
etc. However, no amount of physicalism could explain in full that uncanny nostalgia, that
ephemeral feeling of personal euphoria I experience from gazing upon such a work of art. While
words such as “uncanny” or “ephemeral” may be used to describe the sensation, to say these
words is merely putting it in layman’s terms when given the aesthetic. The same concept can be
applied to music as well: beats per minute, the sound wavelength, even the lyrics of the song can
be objectively explained a la deductive physicalism. But the resonance one may feel upon
listening to a song, that personal harmony within the self that occurs when your favorite song
plays where you least expect it; modern science has yet to explain that. In fact, given any sort of
“realm of experience” (sports, school, home life, work, etc.), a subjective account cannot be
made unless it’s within the person actually experiencing it.
Thomas Nagel proposes a dualist argument that illustrates how our current understanding
of physicalism is nigh incompatible with subjective experience given the inconceivable nature of
experiencing exactly what a bat experiences (on a bat’s terms no less). Critics of this argument
may cite that experiencing bat consciousness may be physically possible in the far future or that
the comparison of humans and bats is trivial. Nagel would probably respond to these by saying
that the first objection may give us bat perspective but would still yield a type of subjectivity

5. NicolasArrisola
PHL 323M
Montague
10/11/14
while the “trivial” comparison can be easily avoided if one were to replace the bat with a
deafblind person. Nagel’s bat argument and his assertion that modern science is dismissive of the
subjective isn’t an attempt to prove deductive physicalism false; rather, he postulates that
deductive physicalism and, by extension, modern science is wrong in its current method for
approaching subjective experience.