What Is It Like to Be a Bat? – Thomas Nagel

Having read several books on consciousness this year, I kept running into references to Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And really, who wouldn’t want to read something with a title like that? The piece itself is quite short, originally published as an article in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, but its influence far outweighs its length.

At its core, Nagel’s essay asks a deceptively simple question: even if we knew everything there is to know about a bat’s biology, neurology, and behavior, would that tell us what it is actually like to be a bat? His answer is essentially no. Bats experience the world through echolocation, a sensory mode so alien to us that we cannot meaningfully imagine it. We can describe the mechanisms, but the subjective experience—the what-it-is-like aspect—remains inaccessible.

Nagel uses this example to argue that consciousness has an irreducibly subjective component. No amount of objective, third-person description can fully capture first-person experience. This poses a serious challenge to reductive materialism, or at least to the idea that consciousness can be completely explained in purely physical terms.

The essay is important well beyond academic philosophy. It has played a significant role in discussions about animal consciousness, animal welfare, and the moral implications that follow from acknowledging subjective experience in non-human creatures. Judging by works like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, we still have a long way to go in taking those implications seriously. While those ethical questions matter, my own curiosity is mainly focused on the problem of consciousness itself—perhaps the biggest question of them all, and one that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember.

Ever since I first became seriously interested in science, and consciousness in particular, I have leaned toward materialism, even if I lacked the vocabulary to describe that position early on. The idea that the mind arises from physical processes has always seemed compelling to me, intuitive even. Reading Nagel, however, feels like encountering a carefully constructed obstacle in that path—one that cannot simply be waved away.

Looking back, I think part of my fascination with science and the mind came from science fiction. Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (L’Île mystérieuse) and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books were early favorites. Ideas like Mulan’s mind-reading abilities and the apparent inner lives of Asimov’s robots planted early questions about how minds work, what counts as thinking, and whether subjective experience could exist in non-human entities.

Nagel does not claim that materialism is false. Rather, he argues that our current physical theories may be fundamentally unsuited to explaining subjective experience. The problem, he suggests, may not be with consciousness itself, but with the conceptual tools we are using to approach it. That restraint—posing a problem without pretending to solve it—is part of what makes the essay so enduring.

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? is not an easy or comforting read, despite its brevity. It leaves you with an unresolved tension: a recognition that consciousness is real, vivid, and central to our existence, and a simultaneous awareness that our best scientific explanations may never fully capture it. For anyone interested in consciousness, philosophy of mind, or the limits of scientific explanation, it remains essential reading—even fifty years on.