Nagel's Theoretical Analysis

Nagel believes that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat due to our lack of understanding of consciousness and consequently our inability to understand another being’s subjective character experience. Nagel chooses a bat to articulate his thesis because it is close enough on the tree of genetic evolution that we do not automatically dismiss its similarities but functionally different enough to ensure that his point is clearly displayed. Nagel is not sure how to determine whether or not an animal has consciousness but he believes that most mammals do. He believes that a bat has conscious experience. The importance of assuming a bat’s consciousness in this example, as Nagel put’s it, is that consciousness means that there is something that it is to be that particular being, that is, there is something it is like to be a bat. The unique
Nagel has established that bats most likely have consciousness and therefore have SCE. Bats experience life in a drastically different fashion then human beings; bats use echolocation in order to navigate environments, they hang upside down during the day to sleep and they fly using their webbed arms to hunt bugs for nourishment. Nagel dismisses the idea that simply imagining what it would be like to do all of the things listed above would suffice in knowing what it was like to be a bat because all that would be accomplished when imagining this would be knowing what it would be like for you to be a bat when the question is essentially “what is it like for a bat to be a bat?”. All the