What's It Like to Be a Bat

The 20th century certainly had its share of philosophical tomes: Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, Process and Reality, and Philosophical Investigations to name just a few. But it also had a full complement of philosophical gems: I and Thou, for example. 

A 1974 essay by Thomas Nagel falls into this second category. By 1900, it had only just occurred to us that mental phenomena could be reduced to chemical reactions and electrical pulses. However important these might be, there just had to be ‘something more’ going on…

Until we decided that there didn’t have to be anything else going on. From Freud to Ryle to Skinner to Dennett, the race was on to find a way to account for consciousness in terms of physical processes alone. After all, we have more or less successfully reduced biology to chemistry, why shouldn’t we expect to reduce consciousness to physiology? 

But Nagel objected to the analogy. Just as it seemed that we were on the brink of a materialist solution to the ‘hard problem’ (consciousness), Thomas Nagel fired a shot across the bow.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? arrived at the academy with all the fanfare of a 3 day old dead fish. There was indeed a stench, but it turned out it was coming from the academy itself. Nagel threw open the windows and let in fresh air and the light of day. He exposed the bankruptcy of the reductionist agenda:

 “There is something that it is like to be a bat…what it is like for a bat to be a bat…because we know what it is like to be us.”

We know what it’s like to be us. Do we? What’s it like to be you? Essentially, Nagel argued for the irreducibility of subjectivity. But on another level, Nagel’s question is a bit odd. How so? What kid hasn’t thought about what it would be like to be a free flying bird or even a majestic oak? 

Granted. But it’s odd because Nagel already knows the answer…and so does every single person who ever has or ever will read Nagel’s book. What is it like to be a bat? Just exactly like what it’s like to be you! 

I suppose it’s possible to wonder about the subjective experience of a member of another species…or another member of your own species for that matter. The problem is that we have absolutely no access to that experience and it’s not clear we ever will. 

Maybe you’re all zombies? I don’t know. Maybe bats are mechanical bots, designed, disguised, and deployed by another civilization? Who knows? But that doesn't mean that Nagel’s question is unimportant or meaningless. Look more closely. The predicate is not ‘bat’, it’s ‘to be’, what is it like to be… And ‘being’ is something everything has in common.

So, “What’s it like to be…(anything)?” Well, what’s it like to be you? That’s exactly what it’s like to be a bat…or anything else for that matter. Everything that is, is what it is, in the same way that you are what you are. Whatever is not what it is in the same way that you are what you are, simply isn’t.

It seems trivial…but it opens a floodgate. For one thing, it explains why there is only ever one you. Once you were a single celled zygote, then an embryo, a baby, child, teen, adult, senior. That initial cell will copy itself 100 trillion times during your lifetime. Right now, about 30 trillion of those copies are alive and working together as your body. 

Throughout all of this there is you and that you never changes. It’s what Thomas Aquinas would have called a ‘simple substance’. It has no parts, aspects or qualities. Think back to your earliest memory. There you were! It was you, the same you that’s chatting with me  now, many decades later. To suggest that four-year-old‘you’ is not the same thing as 44 year old ‘you’ or 88 year old ‘you’ is nonsense. It’s you; you are you. You are not one you, then another you. That’s not what ‘you’ means. You are what remains constant throughout all changes.

Wait! You’re not the same now at 44 as you were at 4? Ok, what’s different? Anything else? Ok, all of what you just described…not you! 

Because of the structure of our neural net, you can recall being 4 years old. (A grandchild once said to me, “I hate the age of 4.”) Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, you cannot ‘remember’ what it was like to be me when I was 4…or as I am now for that matter. Nor can you ‘remember’ what it’s like to be a bat. 

You can’t remember but you can still know because it’s just exactly like it is to be you. Being you is a naked singularity. It is what being is. Many entities share that being but none can modify it. What-is is infinitely variable but being-what-is is singular. It is the topology of Being.

“Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morn and, O, you’re vine! Sendday’s eve, and ah, you’re vinegar!” (James Joyce) 

Finn, Finn-again, vine, vine-gar! You being you, once and forever, polymorphous but never changing. So what’s it like to be a bat? You already know!

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