Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?"

In this episode, I cover Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?"
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[@numbersix8919]

David, thanks for this humorous take-down of analytic (Anglo-American) philosophy. That was my brief education in philosophy. For American philosophy, pragmatism might be a ore fruitful area, James or Popper. But maybe not so interesting.

[@reibala9460]

Reminds me of Norm Macdonald's story about the guy becoming a chicken.

[@elonmuskus1346]

Cool! Thanks It remains to be one of my favorite philosophical papers

[@pepeelcojo8295]

love the scooby-doo reference, hope to see more of them in the future, subscribed

[@danielrincon6908]

away a.2 😊🎉😂7w71x 7w71x is. I I 😢😊b k😂

[@shrayanahaldar8003]

I think, with the inhabiting someone else’s body thing, he’s observing something completely correct to reach a conclusion that is surprisingly off the mark. The very fact that you can’t just inhabit someone else’s body is precisely what a physicalist might say. It’s precisely because the body physically determines the mind that you can’t just do a “transcorporal” transfer of a consciousness. Because there’s no separate thing as a consciousness, it’s inextricably integrated with the body and the body - with society etc. - gives rise to it. Either I’m not sure what Nagel is refuting here or I’m not sure what physicalists usually say about these sorts of transfer stuff.

[@viljamtheninja]

Agreed. Also the problem with going into another person, just as a thought experiment, is that this person just has a new set of social relations which have developed over years and are incredibly complex; it's quite difficult to smoothly navigate something like that. But that's a completely different problem from being a different creature with entirely different senses through which they experience and navigate the world. I see it in a way as a more complex form of the "Try to explain color to a blind person" problem.

[@clumsydad7158]

@@viljamtheninja or was brought up in Ex Machina that I just watched, teaching a person (or maybe an AI) about color while that person only lives in a black and white room. Intellectually, they can learn all about color and spectrums and the science of it down to the minutest detail, but until they walk outside the room and into the world they can't 'feel' or 'know' in that experiential sense of color. how a human interacts with the physicality of the world, thru our body and being, is a whole other thing... how we process and experience the world.

[@numbersix8919]

"What is it like" refers to qualia. Other thought experiments include David Chalmers' "philosophical zombies" and "Mary the blind color scientist."

[@hugofransson5955]

I dunno how this would be a refutation of his argument that we cannot explain subjective phenomena with objective means?

[@clumsydad7158]

one of the first things i had to read in the intro to western philos course in the 90s. kind of the quintessential "let's start thinking outside the box" philosophy primer - taking a position that is outside yourself, and foreign to the extent of being non-human, and trying to imagine what other perspectives, feelings, and sensations may be about. and, overall, if it's possible to even conceive that, since as heidegger and many others have frequently emphasized, it's hard to get outside or 'behind' ourselves ... we are trapped largely in the apparatus of our being

[@gerardlabeouf6075]

So from what i heard nagel seems to also confront heidegger's ideas of worlds and how the things are only perceived in aesthetic, artistic, and fear of death + nostalgia cause if we get out of those states we get in the world of uses (not the right word probably since English is my second language) And this is where an organism Works Not by thinking but by having a habit that is coded in that specific organism's world of uses So all is predisposed and coincides if thinking is not involved in interaction So if you were to become a bat you would already have forgotten your human's world of uses and got in a world that is made for you So actually you wouldn't be shocked as long as there is not many world clashing (you trying to teach your bat world to mices for example)

[@numericalcode]

Do we even have a accurate perception of what we were experiencing a day ago? Or is that memory lacking the same subjective perspective?

[@paka5180]

I wish you added more information about subjective and objective

[@Em-ke2fe]

you are such a deeply intellectual person

[@basilahasnain5271]

Where does Empathy stand in all of this? And if I could frame it properly my question would be, the performativity of mind body conundrum is quite simplistic and disturbingly bifurcated. Isn't the border between the two more porous ? More fluid?

[@mutschie123]

Now you have to do Sylvia Wynter's sociogenic principle :) (drawing on Fanon and Nagel's essay)

[@S3rios]

When Nagel talks about behaviorism he means logical behaviorism, which isnt strictly the same as BF Skinner’s behaviorism. Logical behaviorism is a thesis about the meaning of mental terms which comes from logical positivism. Logical positivists believed that the meaning of statements were dictated by their “verification condition”, which must either be analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable. So, the argument goes, the only verification condition for mental states is behavior and dispositions to behave. Thus the meaning of “X is in pain” is “X has a disposition to exhibit pain behavior” where pain behavior is nursing the damaged area, saying “ow”, searching for ibuprofen to ease the pain, etc. No one really believes this anymore, but that’s what Nagel was referring to.

[@godfather5433]

I guess there is a similar notion that Kafka came up with when someone all of sudden metamorphose to cockroach.

[@filmphilosopher]

Can this be also a definition of consciousness, the possible likeness of something x to something y?

[@bendesle7988]

Have you read his book The Last Word? He has an interesting approach to reason in an effort to articulate a kind of rationalism that would offer objective frameworks to explain subjective experience.

[@numbersix8919]

Sounds interesting.

[@govindnair3064]

HE'S DOING ANALYTIC THIS IS NOT A DRILL HE'S DOING ANALYTIC

[@AlejoHausner]

What’s that cage like thing outside your window?

[@TheoryPhilosophy]

To let my cats outside :)

[@blu3_fish869]

I dont personally understand how it refutes the original argument of cataloging the mind by science, could you not also observe the development of the personal attributes of consciousness from the outside?

[@numbersix8919]

In what sense could your subjective experience be the same as someone else's?

[@Xanaduum]

Bats don't know how to be bats when they are born, they have instincts. Given enough time, a human mind in a the body of a bat would find a way to exist/survive as a bat even without the instincts of the bat. However it would not totally be a bat, and not totally human anymore. Given enough time that human mind would probably get used to it. Is that the true horror, that you may become used to it, may even come to enjoy or find comfort in being a bat?

[@adventurouskashmir7341]

Hey could you please make more videos on posthumanism. I will desperately wait for your videos to come

[@numbersix8919]

Having instincts means having inherent implicit knowledge.

[@basilahasnain5271]

And to repeat, do we really need more objective phenomenlogies ?

[@2msvalkyrie529]

Ask Bruce Wayne...??

[@MitchellLutes]

Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?"

[@EarnestBunbury]

Isn’t the comparison with a bat unnecessary? We don’t even know, wether other humans see the world the same (qualia) On a sidenote, Why don’t we just ask Bruce Wayne, aka Batman? Jk

[@grahamelliott7276]

Perhaps the bat proposition is (was) a fresh way to pose that question: how can we ever know without mediation what another being - human or non-human - can experience ?

[@oguzcanolgac1073]

“ “Analytical Philosophy” “

[@unclebuildy7030]

Did any of this have a point? Scooby and Disney movies? Bats? Why not insects or plankton? Pseudo intelectual masturbation for infantiles who enjoy cartoons and anthromorphosation. I'll stick with martin heidegger for the time being. (Ya see what I did there?)

[@Stars4Hearts]

I know how some people may feel about Metamorphosis..🪲