What Is It Like to Be A Bat? by Thomas Nagel
One of the last century’s most intriguing philosophical inquiries wondered, “What is it like to be a bat?” Originally published in 1974, Thomas Nagel’s essay has been republished as a slender book with a new introduction and an appendix of highly technical, post-grad level material. The essay itself remains essential. It triggered interest in the consciousness of non-human animals—science once held that animals had no consciousness—and raised important questions about the limits of human knowledge. Nagel’s point is that we might imagine what it’s like to be a bat, based on our own preconceptions, but we have no way to comprehend how a creature alien to ourselves actually understands its world. “There are facts,” he writes, “that can never be represented or comprehended by human beings … simply because our structure does not permit us” to understand them. We are finite in a universe whose limits are unknown.
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