Mirror as one which would allow a praying man to use them for his personal piety: the mirror surrounded by scenes of the Passion to reflect on it and on oneself, a rosary as a device in this process, the veiled and cushioned bench to use as a prie-dieu, and the abandoned shoes that point in the direction in which the praying man kneeled. The metaphorical meaning of depicted mirrors is complex and many-layered, e.g. as an attribute of Mary, the “speculum sine macula”, or as attributes of scholarly and theological wisdom and knowledge as they appear in book illuminations of
What Is it Like to Be a Bat? to have a conscious experience it must be special, in the sense that its qualia or "subjective character of experience" are unique. Nagel stated, "An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism to be itself." The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. A subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a system of functional or intentional states. Consciousness cannot be explained without the subjective character