Do bats feel lust?
Consciousness is everywhere at the moment, and it is notable how frequently writers quote Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper What is it like to be a bat?, and especially the phrase, which occurs quite early on:
Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.
It's an intriguing phrase, a bit circular — an organism has conscious experience means that there is something it is like to be that organism — and passed over quickly by quotation as if it has explained something, as in a recent (very interesting) review Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence:
Insights from the Science of Consciousness. Nagel though spends the rest of his paper coming inconclusively to terms with the issues arising from his thought experiment. Among the issues which remain unresolved are subjectivity versus objectivity in the field of experience, and the relationship between facts and conceptual schemas. This uncertainty leads to the conclusion that we can not be certain that there might not be other forms of consciousness, and ‘if there’s conscious life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us’. That somewhere else in the universe might be the roomba in the next room next year.
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People tend to quote Nagel as if he’s solved something, when plainly he has not, and he makes no claim to have done so.
Very little work has been done on the basic question (from which mention of the brain can be entirely omitted) whether any sense can be made of experiences’ having an objective character at all. Does it make sense, in other words, to ask what my experiences are really like, as opposed to how they appear to me? We cannot genuinely understand the hypothesis that their nature is captured in a physical description unless we understand the more fundamental idea that they have an objective nature (or that objective processes can have a subjective nature).
