Nagel
Join now to read essay Nagel
I chose the author Thomas Nagel. He writes about the relation between the subjective and the objective. the contines to explain this further by giving the example of bats.
Bats perceive the world by sonar detecting the reflections from objects within range. The information their brains receive
from the impulses with the echoes enables bat to make discriminations about their surrounding and movement. Bat sonar isnt comparable to any sense that a human posesses. Humans can imagine what it is like to behave like a bat, but we cant imagine what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
The facts of the bats own experience are only accessible from the bats point of view, therefore humans cannot know how that organism experiences it. We can occupy the relevant point of view, but we have difficulty understanding the experiences from our own point of view. It would be as if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its own point of view.
He believes that these experiences also have a specific subjective character, which we do not have the ability to perceive. Nagel believes in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts.
“Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable,” is the first sentence of Nagels study.