What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Version 1.0.0 · Updated 2026-07-28
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"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivi
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"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper pre
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Nagel's classic paper argues that physicalism can explain third-person facts about the brain and behavior, but cannot derive first-person subjective experience (qualia). The "explanatory gap" makes subjectivity irreducible to physical description.
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