Post #1302796

2026-03-27 18:23 UTC

It's the fact of subjective experience - the warmth of a campfire, the bitterness of lemon, the greenness of green. We're essentially talking about consciousness here. The fact that there's something it is like to *be*. While nobody knows what consciousness is or how it comes about, what I mean by it is best captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his aforementioned essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" > Nagel argues that consciousness has an essentially subjective character, a what-it-is-like aspect. He states that "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.

Replies (1)

@partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2026-03-27 19:28

The premise still strikes me as odd. How can we know it’s *like anything* to be anything, if we can not know what it’s like to be anything else? Coming from a premise that, to truly understand anything, you must also understand what it is not. Is it really fair to presume, from our biased perspective where “likeness” is an abstract quality of “being,” that everything ought have a manner of which it is like to be? What about the totality of the universe, to include all its embedded agents. What would that be like? Would an ever small portion of that *likeness* include precisely what it’s like to be me? Do you think it would be possible to qualitatively describe and differentiate between two distinct phenomenologies, one day? Not just behaviorally, but to actually differentiate between their internal processes — what it’s *like* to be them? And what might it be like to be a whirlpool, lightning, or even an entire ecosystem? Would that strictly be as ludicrous as asking “what might it be like to be a rock,” or is there something else to be said given whirlpools, lightning, and ecosystems are more-or-less events rather than objects? I don’t disagree with the argument you shared… I think there’s an obvious difference between what it’s like to be a bat versus a human, but I also feel like we’re missing something important that clearer terminology could work out.

Open ##1302797