Re:What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
by trescenzi on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @04:20PM
(#45119974)
So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness? That everything is conscious? The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”. You don’t need dualism to agree with that quote. I agree with Nagel’s general construction but I’m also a materialist. The hard problem doesn’t mean magic is needed to solve it, just that we don’t have a good explanation for why subjective experience exists.
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Re:What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
by mensetmanusman on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @05:23PM
(#45120558)
Materialists don’t even know what materials are though.
Re:What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
by bondarchuk on Wednesday September 03, 2025 @04:39PM
(#45120168)
>The intent of that quote is to say “consciousness is subjective experience”
I doubt Nagel would go out of his way to offer such an unnatural linguistic construction, and other philosophers would adopt this construction as a standard point of reference, if that was the sole intent.
>So then are you saying there is no such thing as consciousness?
No, not at all. I'm only saying that if we want to talk about "the consciousness of a bat", we should talk about it directly, and not invent (implicitly) a second concept that is in some senses distinct from it, and in some sense comparable to it.