Revisiting “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Consciousness, and the Divine Image
How to be a better neighbor
In 1974, philosopher, Thomas Nagel, published an essay that has rippled through the field of both philosophy or mind, psychology, and psychiatry, and even neuroscience. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was a refutation to what is known as “physicalism,” the idea the human consciousness arises from the body. Nagel is not against the physicalism stance but finds that it does not solve the mind-body problem. The essay is one that was in a philosophy reader that I could have taught, but at that time, I did not quite have the teaching chops that I do today to teach it to freshmen students at Sam Houston State. However, because of recent questions about AI and the question of consciousness, it has come up again. Theologically, it can be turned to ask some important questions about God’s understanding of humans in “What is it like to be a human?” and even conversely, “What is it like to be a god?” I would argue that the “image of God” in humans is the only way that divine/human consciousness can go either way, and it is in this knowledge that love is possible.
Let’s first review some definitions of consciousness: 1) Awareness of existence 2) Subjective experience. Nagel takes on the second view of consciousness because is applicable not only to humans. I mentioned in a previous article that humans are not the only animals to have subjective experiences and that conscious experience occurs on many levels. My dog can experience a wide variety of sensations that are like me, but in various ways that I cannot understand. My husky’s noise can lead her to food as soon as I open a plastic bag from the other room. My Jindo’s ears perk up as soon as she hears the mail person walk close to the door. I might be able to see a larger spectrum of color than they can, but their other senses are superior in ways that I don’t understand. However, Nagel chooses to use a bat because the way it experiences the world is so much different than humans. Its vision is not very good, but has sonar abilities that humans do not possess. It lives life upside down. It flies through the air to catch insects. There are so much about the life of a bat that we can image what it is like but can never be.
This is where Nagel’s definition comes into play. His argument is that only thorough the subjective experience of that organism that an organism can have consciousness:
“But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.”
Of course, the only organism that knows what it’s like to be that organism is the organism itself. We can have detailed information on how a bat experiences the world, but we can never know what it is like to be one. This is what makes the mind-body problem intractable to solve based on physical properties alone. Being a bat is not just about having wings or fur or echo location. In the Apple TV+ series, See, humans in a dystopian future are without sight and use echo location to maneuver about in the world, and with great accuracy. There are people who can do this today. However, they can never know what it is really like to be a bat. Batman dressing up like a bat and even flying around does not know what its like to be a bat. This is Nagel’s point. How can a subjective experience arise from an objective thing called the brain?
If consciousness arises from our cerebral cortex or, some, like neurologist Mark Solms will say the brain stem, then the how can something that is an object, an “it” come to consider itself an “I.” In no universe can a pencil become conscious. However, an animal, which is a collection of living cells, can have experiential subjectivity. Nagel calls then the “subjective character of experience.” In other words, there is nothing about the functioning of the brain, which keeps all our body operational, an organ that is also something that gives way to subjectivity. Am I just my brain? If we traded brains, am I simply the brain in your body and you your brain in mine? You see the problem?
Blondie giving a philosophy lecture
What Nagel is trying to get at is expressing the problem of the “real nature of the phenomenon,” the phenomenon of consciousness. Again, he sees to question the problem of physicalism, that “mental states are states of the body.” The body can do many things, but can it give rise to subjectivity? The temptation for the theologian is to detour into something called a “soul” for the answer, but I’m not going to go there either because it sets up a dichotomy, a dualism, or goes into rabbit hole that I can’t find my way out because of pure speculation. Rather, I want to explore the more fascinating way in which this problem can be used to think about the God/human relationship.
If God is supreme consciousness, then to know what it is like to be a human, the precondition is 1) to be human and 2) to create humans with something that is like God. The Christian tradition provides the narrative framework of God becoming human and humans being made in the image of God. But another fascinating aspect of this is that the thought experiment can go the other way in that we can ask “What is it like to be a god?” What is it like to be able to exert our abilities to our fullest capacities, which is god-like. Moreover, what is it like to exercise the greatest ability of God, to love generously and tenderly? When we can do these things, we then are bridging the divine/human problem, one that was never there to begin with.
Lastly, one, perhaps among many, criticism of Nagel’s paper is of solipsism, lapsing into the idea that one’s mind is all there is and because we cannot know what it is like to be another thing, we are trapped within the self. However, Nagel is not making this point and simply saying that a consciousness of a bat is knowing what it is like to be one. It does not annihilate the existence of any other consciousness. This was Descartes’ assumption, in “I think therefore I am.” If my consciousness is about my subjective experience, then I know what it is like to be a human. Also, I can assume that any human is conscious if they know what it is like to be human also. What Nagel might argue is that we have difficulty knowing what it is like to be that or this human, that empathy is therefore difficult. Well, I will have to look at our world and say that he is correct. However, because it is difficult, does not make it impossible or unnecessary. Nagel would dispense of empathy to find more objective ways to describe subjective experience, but if we are doing that, we might as well try a try to know what it’s like to be a bat, or a dog, or our next-door neighbor, however unneighborly they are to us. If our humanity does not have the strength to do so, perhaps our divine self will do so.