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The Philosopher's Shirt

Thomas Nagel: Bat Experience

Nagel asked what it is like to be a bat and showed that no amount of physical description of echolocation gets you to the experience of it. The problem is still open.

The single most cited paper in modern philosophy of mind, made visual. Available across tees, sweatshirts, hoodies and mugs, printed to order. You can know everything about the bat and still not be one.

Questions about this design

What does the Thomas Nagel Bat Experience design show?
A mock online review card – five gold stars, a bat's face as the profile picture, the reviewer Batty Bloodsuck, verified purchase on October 20, 1974 – saying I had a bat experience reading Thomas Nagel. The date nods to the month Nagel's famous paper appeared, and the pun turns a bad experience into the most famous bat in philosophy.
What is Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
A short paper published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974 and one of the most cited texts in philosophy of mind. Nagel argues that an organism has conscious experience if there is something it is like to be that organism, and that this subjective character is left out by every purely physical, objective description of the brain.
What is Nagel's argument in What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Science describes the world from an objective standpoint, but experience exists only from a point of view. We could learn every fact about a bat's neurons and sonar and still not know what echolocating feels like for the bat. So current physicalist theories, which reduce the mind to objective facts, cannot yet explain consciousness.
Why did Nagel choose a bat?
Because bats are mammals, close enough to us that few doubt they have experiences, yet they perceive the world mainly by echolocation, a sense utterly unlike anything we have. Imagining hanging upside down or having webbed arms only tells you what it would be like for you to behave like a bat – not what it is like for the bat.
What does something it is like mean in philosophy of mind?
It is Nagel's widely used criterion for consciousness – a creature is conscious if there is something it is like to be it, from the inside. There is nothing it is like to be a stone or a thermostat, but there is something it is like to be you reading this. Philosophers also call this the subjective or phenomenal character of experience, or qualia.
What is the hard problem of consciousness?
The question of why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience at all, as opposed to the easier problems of explaining functions like attention or memory. David Chalmers named it in 1995, but Nagel's bat paper of 1974 is one of its most influential precursors.
Was Thomas Nagel a dualist?
No. In the bat paper he says it would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism is false – only that we have no idea how it could be true. Later, in Mind and Cosmos (2012), he argued that the standard materialist picture of nature is probably incomplete, which made the book controversial, but he still does not defend a separate mental substance.
Who is Thomas Nagel?
An American philosopher born in Belgrade in 1937, long a professor at New York University. Besides the bat paper he wrote Mortal Questions (1979), The View from Nowhere (1986), on reconciling subjective and objective viewpoints, and the classic short introduction What Does It All Mean? (1987).
How is Nagel's bat related to Mary's room?
Both are arguments that physical facts may not capture everything about experience. In Frank Jackson's 1982 thought experiment, Mary knows all the physics of colour but has lived in a black-and-white room; when she first sees red, does she learn something new? Nagel's bat asks the same question from outside another species.
Who is the Thomas Nagel Bat Experience design a good gift for?
For philosophy of mind students, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, bat lovers and anyone who has written an essay on qualia at 3 a.m. The design comes as a T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.