That guy who was almost lynched by Darwin’s “punks, bullies, and hangers-on” for (… well, did he like some book by Steve Meyer or was he maybe just behind in his protection money? Honestly, even we can’t keep up any more.)
Apparently, it wasn’t career suicide. Which could testify either to his durability or the waning of the power of the punks, bullies, and hangers on, or both. Anyway, This from The Hedgehog:
The philosopher Thomas Nagel drew popular attention to the Hard Problem four decades ago in an influential essay titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Frustrated with the “recent wave of reductionist euphoria,”1 Nagel challenged the reductive conception of mind—the idea that consciousness resides as a physical reality in the brain—by highlighting the radical subjectivity of experience. His main premise was that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism.”
If that idea seems elusive, consider it this way: A bat has consciousness only if there is something that it is like for that bat to be a bat. Sam has consciousness only if there is something it is like for Sam to be Sam. You have consciousness only if there is something that it is like for you to be you (and you know that there is). And here’s the key to all this: Whatever that “like” happens to be, according to Nagel, it necessarily defies empirical verification. You can’t put your finger on it. It resists physical accountability.
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For all of McNerney’s curiosity—one deeply reflective of a humanistic temperament—it has led him headlong into a topic (the Hard Problem) that has the potential to alter permanently the place of the humanities in academic life. If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what it is like to be human, much less a bat, turns out to be empirically situated in the dense switchboard of the brain, what happens to Shakespeare, Swift, Woolf, or Wittgenstein when it comes to explaining ourselves to ourselves?
It’s perhaps because of this concern that Nagel’s famous essay stays famous, playing a rearguard role in philosophy seminars throughout the country. By challenging the very notion of a biological understanding of consciousness, by positing individual consciousness as an existential reality that defies objectification, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” breathes continual life into a phenomenon—the inner subjectivity of experience—that science has yet to illuminate with empirical exactitude. More.
It’s not clear to some of us that the problem is lack of exactitude. Rather, subjectivity can be an exact, unique experience, but not necessarily sharable.
Science doesn’t make a scientist a bat. So the scientist can know a lot about bats, but can’t really know what it is like to be a bat without being one.
And if she were a bat, she wouldn’t be a scientist. So there we are. That’s an existential dilemma for a summer afternoon.
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