I've no idea where to put this, but this ties in with the "books" portion of this sub-forum.
Thomas Nagel wrote this essay in 1974. The gist of it is this: Nagel conducts a thought-experiment to see if the division between "brain" and "consciousness" (e.g., the "mind-brain problem") can be meaningfully depicted. Nagel chooses a bat because it is superficially so like us--it's a mammal, it has senses, and so forth--and yet is so totally unlike us that it becomes difficult to reconcile our experiences with that of the bat. Nagel is not interested in human-as-bat experience, but in bat-relating-bat experience. If we cannot achieve the second, resolving the mind-brain problem using traditional definitions and approaches is a lost cause.
Something has troubled me about how we go about describing ourselves, our lives, and our narratives (Wittgenstein would say is what we are is the story that we tell about ourselves) to others. It is thoroughly modern to argue the case of specificity ("you may consider what it is to be a bat when--and only when--you are a bat") as opposed to generalizability (one may have an imprecise but more or less conveyable notion of what it's like to exist outside oneself, and language is the instrument of shaping and forming this notion).
Which of these approaches on the spectrum is more likely applicable to answering questions of consciousness and being?
Simply put: must we be a bat to describe what it is to be a bat ("specificity"), or can we get a close enough approximation via language and determined probing ("generalizability")?
Thomas Nagel wrote this essay in 1974. The gist of it is this: Nagel conducts a thought-experiment to see if the division between "brain" and "consciousness" (e.g., the "mind-brain problem") can be meaningfully depicted. Nagel chooses a bat because it is superficially so like us--it's a mammal, it has senses, and so forth--and yet is so totally unlike us that it becomes difficult to reconcile our experiences with that of the bat. Nagel is not interested in human-as-bat experience, but in bat-relating-bat experience. If we cannot achieve the second, resolving the mind-brain problem using traditional definitions and approaches is a lost cause.
Something has troubled me about how we go about describing ourselves, our lives, and our narratives (Wittgenstein would say is what we are is the story that we tell about ourselves) to others. It is thoroughly modern to argue the case of specificity ("you may consider what it is to be a bat when--and only when--you are a bat") as opposed to generalizability (one may have an imprecise but more or less conveyable notion of what it's like to exist outside oneself, and language is the instrument of shaping and forming this notion).
Which of these approaches on the spectrum is more likely applicable to answering questions of consciousness and being?
Simply put: must we be a bat to describe what it is to be a bat ("specificity"), or can we get a close enough approximation via language and determined probing ("generalizability")?
