The Hard Problem of Consciousness: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel
About What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Thomas Nagel is a big name in 20th-century philosophy, especially when it comes to questions about the mind, consciousness, and what it feels like to be a living, thinking creature. In his famous 1974 essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, Nagel dives into the mystery of consciousness—specifically, how hard it is to truly understand what it’s like to be someone (or something) else.
This essay is a key part of what philosophers call “the hard problem of consciousness.” That’s the puzzle of why brain activity isn’t just processing info like a computer—but also comes with feelings, sensations, and experiences. Why does pain hurt? Why does red look the way it does? And can science ever really explain that?
Nagel’s big move is to focus on subjective experience—the idea that being conscious means there’s something it feels like to be you. And to drive the point home, he picks a bat. Bats are mammals, sure, but their world is completely different from ours—they fly, they echolocate, they sense space in totally foreign ways. Even if we knew every single fact about a bat’s brain, Nagel argues, we’d still never truly grasp what it’s like to be a bat from the inside.
His point? There’s something about consciousness that can’t be captured by science alone—at least not yet. It’s not just about brain data; it’s about the personal, first-person feel of being alive. And that, Nagel says, is something no third-person scientific explanation can fully touch.
This short, punchy essay has become a go-to in debates about minds, consciousness, and even artificial intelligence. It challenges us to think differently—not just about other creatures, but about what it means to be a conscious being at all.
Before You Read
Try this thought experiment: imagine being a bat. Not pretending to flap your arms like wings—but actually sensing the world through echolocation, hanging upside down in a cave, and navigating space with high-frequency sounds. Kinda hard to picture, right?
That’s exactly Nagel’s point. In this essay, he argues that consciousness isn’t just about brains doing stuff—it’s about what it feels like to be a conscious creature. And that feeling, that perspective, is deeply personal and hard (maybe impossible) to explain from the outside.
Before diving in, keep this in mind: Nagel isn’t trying to say bats are better than us. He’s making a bigger argument about the limits of science and objectivity when it comes to understanding subjective experience. He wants us to stop pretending we can reduce the mind to a bunch of equations and brain scans—and instead wrestle with the weirdness of what it means to be a self.
Guiding Questions
- What does Nagel mean by the phrase “what it is like to be a bat”?
- Why does he think we can’t fully understand another creature’s subjective experience?
- How does this argument relate to the “hard problem” of consciousness?
- What challenges does Nagel’s view pose for scientific or physicalist theories of the mind?
Where to find this reading
This contemporary text is not in the public domain or shared with a creative commons license. Your college or university may have access to this reading through these different sources
