What Is it Like to Be a Bat? perceptional experiences. While it is possible to imagine what it would be like to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects like a bat, that is not the same as a bat's perspective. Nagel claims that even if humans were able to metamorphose gradually into bats, their brains would not have been wired as a bat's from birth; therefore, they would only be able to experience the life and behaviors of a bat, rather than the mindset. Such is the difference between subjective and objective points of view. According to Nagel, "our own mental activity is the
What Is it Like to Be a Bat? a necessary precondition for understanding the mind-body problem. Dennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation. For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. What Is it Like to Be a Bat? "What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published