Nagel
Essay by review • January 24, 2011 • Essay • 394 Words (2 Pages) • 1,118 Views
I chose the author Thomas Nagel. He writes about the relation between the subjective and the objective. the contines to explain this further by giving the example of bats.
Bats perceive the world by sonar detecting the reflections from objects within range. The information their brains receive
from the impulses with the echoes enables bat to make discriminations about their surrounding and movement. Bat sonar isn't comparable to any sense that a human posesses. Humans can imagine what it is like to behave like a bat, but we can't imagine what it is like for a bat to be a bat.
The facts of the bats own experience are only accessible from the bat's point of view, therefore humans cannot know how that organism experiences it. We can occupy the relevant point of view, but we have difficulty understanding the experiences from our own point of view. It would be as if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its own point of view.
He believes that these experiences also have a specific subjective character, which we do not have the ability to perceive. Nagel believes in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts.
"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable," is the first sentence of Nagel's study. He goes on saying that consciousness makes the problem difficult to grasp. He starts off with saying that only organisms that experience something that affects it in a mental way. THat is called the subjectiv e character of experience. Nagel denies that the conscious mental states and events that cause behavior change their analysis of the world around them.
I disagree with Nagel because
he talks about humans not even being able to imagine what it is lie to be a bat because we do not have their pint of view. If we observe a bats activites, we can get a sense of how they live out each day, and then be able toimagine how ti would be for us to do the same. There is research that explains how bats use their echolocation. We can take that into consideration and improve our own thoughts on how its like for a bat to be a bat. We can get an idea of what the bat experiences.
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