What Is It Like To Be A Bat?
posted 11 hours ago # 0 Comments
Stick with me for a moment.
Somehow I stumbled across Finn Streuper, a musician from the Netherlands who recently released an (excellent) album entitled What It’s Like to Be a Bat. It's a pleasing combo of bleeps and bloops, reed instruments, harp sounds, field recordings and a blissed out vibe overall.
What really struck me tho was one little credit:
The paper itself is available in various places online but understanding it is a whole other undertaking. Wikipedia does a decent job of breaking it down but, as far as I can tell, it is a disseratation on the idea that your consciousness can not be explained by a physical description of your brain. To put it in a much denser way:
Despite my doubts that I can fully comprehend this work, I do enjoy thinking about it. I like the idea that existence is a lived-in experience that can not be explained purely by describing how blood flows through us or how synapses fire when we think. The "mind-body" problem can not be reduced to explanation without the consideration of the experience of being alive.
"What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" indeed.
Somehow I stumbled across Finn Streuper, a musician from the Netherlands who recently released an (excellent) album entitled What It’s Like to Be a Bat. It's a pleasing combo of bleeps and bloops, reed instruments, harp sounds, field recordings and a blissed out vibe overall.
Based on Thomas Nagel's paper 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' published in The Philosophical Review in 1974.I was intrigued! I sought it out.
The paper itself is available in various places online but understanding it is a whole other undertaking. Wikipedia does a decent job of breaking it down but, as far as I can tell, it is a disseratation on the idea that your consciousness can not be explained by a physical description of your brain. To put it in a much denser way:
Consciousness cannot be fully explained if the subjective character of experience is ignored, and the subjective character of experience cannot be explained by a reductionist; it is a mental phenomenon that cannot be reduced to materialism.Truthfully, I find the whole thing difficult to penetrate. My brain is not quite sharp enough to handle an essay of this kind of thinking. I never took a philosophy class in college and I think this is a good example of why.
Despite my doubts that I can fully comprehend this work, I do enjoy thinking about it. I like the idea that existence is a lived-in experience that can not be explained purely by describing how blood flows through us or how synapses fire when we think. The "mind-body" problem can not be reduced to explanation without the consideration of the experience of being alive.
"What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" indeed.