★★☆☆☆ Possibly the most famous 20th-century essay on Philosophy of mind

What is it like to be a Bat? / Wie ist es, eine Fledermaus zu sein?

Thomas Nagel

If you're a neuroscientist, you are sure to be told by some of your colleagues that "consciousness [always spoken in a tone of awe] is the most important problem in neuroscience". Or perhaps "the only important problem". If you hear a neuroscientist say this, then you know immediately that he/she is not an original thinker. (To my neuroscientist colleagues -- I apologize if I have wounded you. But it is best that you know the truth about yourself.) Neuroscientists are not alone in making pretentious and totally unsupported claims about consciousness. Philosophers do it, too!

I first read What is it like to be a Bat?, probably around the year 1981, in The Mind’s I: by Douglas R. Hofstadter, where it was reprinted in English translation. I was recently reminded of it by the science fiction novels Children of Time and Children of Ruin. That provoked me to pick up What is it like to be a Bat? again. This time I read it in the original German, which helps, since there are significant translation issues.

I have a recurring problem when I read philosophy. Most books by philosophers begin with the author describing the work of past philosophers and explaining what is wrong with them. This part of the book is usually very convincing. Then the author expounds his/her own views, and it all falls apart. The only thing that philosophers can do consistently and convincingly is tell you why philosophers are wrong. It is hard to avoid the impression that most philosophers are wrong most of the time.

That is exactly what it was like reading Wie ist es, eine Fledermaus zu sein?. I'm not going to go into detail about why I think almost every important thing Thomas Nagel has to say about consciousness is wrong, because Daniel Dennett has, in my view (obviously, Nagel would not agree), done an excellent job of demolishing Nagel's arguments (Consciousness Explained).

The far more interesting question is this: was Adrian Tchaikovsky inspired by Nagel and Dennett's argument? Consciousness Explained contains these words

Nagel chose his target creatures well. Bats, as fellow mammals, are enough like us to support the conviction that of course they are conscious. (If he had written “What Is It Like to Be a Spider?” many would be inclined to wonder what made him so sure it was like anything at all.)

Was Tchaikovsky's novel about intelligent spiders inspired by this?

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