Topic > What It's Like to Be a Bat Versus Thomas Nagel Essay

In today's society, the mind is a set of cognitive elements that enable an individual's consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment, and memory. Furthermore, without our mind and/or our conscious experiences, a person would not be able to understand what makes them who they are. Similarly, in Thomas Nagel's essay "What It's Like to Be a Bat", Nagel states that even if there is something it means to be an organism, humans are not capable of fully knowing what it is like to be a bat. Furthermore, Nagel supports his claims through the importance of an organism's conscious experiences, memories, and knowledge that allow an individual to identify. Therefore, in this article I will discuss Nagel's argument that I believe according to the analogy argument, although an individual may experience the same sensations or feelings as me, it does not mean that we share the same conscious experiences. For example, consider the conscious experiences between a blind man and a man with normal vision participating in the same routines and/or activities throughout the day. In this scenario, both men cannot claim to know what it is like to be the other person based on their different experiences with their sense of sight. In other words, the man who has normal vision is usually able to understand what he is reading, eating or doing at a certain time of the day. However, the blind person does not have the ability to rely on his sense of sight to understand what activities he participates in. Therefore, although both men have the ability to understand how the other's senses work and/or feel, their experiences with sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing can only be shared with each other. themselves and no one else. For this reason, Nagel would say that both men could not have known what it was like to be the other person due to a lack of prior knowledge, memories, or knowledge.