The study of consciousness in philosophy has been focused on human consciousness, understandably so, since a primary interest of philosophy is the condition of man in relation to the world. Examining our own consciousness is one key approach, which poses major difficulties since there are limits to how we can peer into our own minds as we are unable to step outside ourselves to view ourselves objectively. We address this by examining the consciousness of others, but this poses its own difficulties since we are able to do so only through our own perspective without the possibility of being able to get ‘inside’ the other person. It is only possible by assuming there is a ‘sympathy’ due to the presumed similarities of our species. The scientific approach has been focused on empirically examining our physiognomy, cognition and external behaviour to infer what is going on in our minds, but Nagel believes that this physicalist approach is reductionistic and hence inadequate.[3]
To explain why, Nagel stretches the problem of other minds further, extending the concept of the Other to species such as ‘lower’ animals and hypothetical beings such as Martians. Through this method, he shows how developing an objective account of consciousness always misses out the crucial element of subjectivity. For instance, the range of activities and sensory apparatus of a bat[4] makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for another species such as man to understand how bats perceive the world. Such a subjectivity arises from the subject’s singular point of view, and to be able to enter into such a point of view, one has to become that subject. Given the impossibility of becoming a Martian or a bat, Nagel believes there are limits to our understanding of consciousness.
Daniel Dennett writes a forceful rebuttal 21 years later, refuting Nagel’s account and postulating that we can achieve a sufficient understanding of animal consciousness even with science’s current behaviourist and reductionistic physicalist approaches. This paper assesses how effective the arguments of both philosophers are, whether in principle the study of consciousness is limited due to the subjective nature of consciousness, and whether the objective phenomenology suggested by Nagel may be the solution. While philosophers of mind should take heed of Dennett’s position that they should keep up with the developments in the sciences regarding the study of cognition, neurology, psychology and related disciplines to inform their philosophy, they may also want to heed Nagel’s proposal of adopting phenomenology as the methodology of choice to investigate conscious experience, as had been successfully done by important thinkers such as Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The Inadequacy of Science on Consciousness
Consciousness is a mental phenomenon and to understand it, the sciences have been prone to adopting a reductionistic physicalist approach given its successes in examining other natural phenomena with the same method of simplification and objectification. However, according to Nagel, this approach fails because we have “no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be.” A physicalist conception of living things is inadequate because we understand too little about the subjective nature of lived experience.[5]
To demonstrate the extent of this difficulty, Nagel examines the experience of a specific animal, a bat. First, he needs to establish that a bat has consciousness. To do so, he posits that many animals have conscious experience even as he concedes that it is uncertain that ‘lower’ animals have it. It is not clear what would even count as evidence for the presence of consciousness. However, if the notion that animals have consciousness is accepted, we would have to accept that “the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”[6]
He chooses to use the example of a bat to make his case because it is an animal he considers sufficiently advanced such that it can have conscious experience and which “range of activity” and “sensory apparatus” are significantly different from human beings. Bats have poor vision and use their hearing via echolocation to navigate, doing so with great precision. Their ability to make out shapes, distances, movements and dimensions of objects are similar to how a man uses his vision. However, while both vision and sonar are used to perceive the surroundings, they do not operate in the same way, nor provide the same experience to their users. We can attempt to understand what the bat experiences through our imagination, but that can only tell us “what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves”. That is not enough. What is required to understand the subjective experience of the bat is to know “what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” We are at the epistemic limits of possible knowledge since it is not possible to become a bat.[7]
While this example demonstrates our inability to understand how bats experience the world, the same reasoning can be extended to demonstrate our inability to understand other people. Nagel suggests how a person born deaf and blind would have a different perceptual apparatus to an able-bodied person, and hence have a different subjective experience.[8] But why stop there? No two persons have exactly the same upbringing and social circumstances, inhabit the exact same bodies and share the same personality traits. Hence all individuals can be said to have different subjective experiences. However, Nagel is not aiming at solipsism here. He allows that creatures that are “sufficiently similar” to one another may be able to adopt the point of view of their fellow creatures and hence understand the other’s subjective experience.
In the case of human beings, we describe our own experience by speaking of it using words that are understood by creatures similar to us, that is, our fellow human beings. Such phenomenological facts may seem to be objective but they are in Nagel’s view subjective, since they are only accessible to creatures sufficiently similar to the experiencing object. An alien that has no eyes might understand colours as a wavelength, or lightning as a blast of energy, but that is different from how human beings perceive colours (as a quality) and lightning (for example as a metaphorical force of nature). When confronted with a phenomenology different from our own such as those of bats or Martians, human language does not suffice to describe those experiences in their full “richness of detail.” There will be facts concerning bat or alien experience that would not be expressible in our language. Not only are these facts inexpressible, they may even be beyond comprehension because the structure of our understanding cannot handle those concepts.[9]
A Quest for Objectivity
Why then is there such a quest for objectivity despite its inadequacy? It is because objectivity is considered a “more accurate view of the real nature of things.” Objectivity is achieved through moving away from the subjective, “reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation.” The scientific method shifts us away from our subjective sense-impressions towards a more generic description of the object’s effects and properties. For example, to find out how warm an object is, we make determinations not dependent on our senses, measuring its temperature using a thermometer instead of relying on the sensation of hot or cold we perceive from touching the object. Nagel agrees that such an objective approach works for examining things outside ourselves, because “we have the phenomenal point of view. Therefore, we can abandon it (our subjectivity) in favour of another, and still be thinking about the same things.” [10] This approach does not work however, when we consider experiences.
Experience is about the internal contents of how and what we feel and think when we interact with the world, and that is inevitably subjective. If our aim is to better understand our experience, then by being objective and putting aside the specificity of our point of view, we will fail to achieve the very goal intended. “If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it,” writes Nagel. Our subjective experience is, in Nagel’s words, “the essence of the internal world.”[11]
What does this imply for the mind-body problem? Nagel does not outright deny the physicalist account of consciousness, but he believes that “physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true.” Here, Nagel overstates his case since theories such as epiphenomenalism and emergence have been proposed to support the physicalist position. Nagel does propose a solution to study our necessarily subjective and individual points of views, that is, an “objective phenomenology, not dependent on empathy or the imagination.” This objective phenomenology will “describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.”[12]
Nagel’s appeal to phenomenology, while belated, remains timely. At the time of publication of his article in 1974, Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, had already passed away for 36 years. Phenomenology was by then already firmly established. Nonetheless, Husserl would agree with Nagel that the phenomenological method is an appropriate vehicle to understand subjective experience and foundational to the study of consciousness:
What can be apprehended as localised stratum of the Body as well as what can be apprehended as dependent on the Body […] and on the “sense organs,” all this forms, under the heading of the matter of consciousness, an underlying basis of consciousness and undergoes its realising apprehension in unity with this consciousness as soul and psychic Ego.[13]
Like Nagel, the phenomenologists oppose behaviourism and reductionism in the natural sciences, focusing on socio-historical or cultural aspects of life and reflecting on processes in our conscious experience.[14] Jean-Paul Sartre carries out precisely this to great effect in 1943 when he published his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, using the phenomenological lens to examine the ontology of consciousness, its relationship with the world and with other consciousnesses.[15]
Dennett’s Response to Nagel
Nagel’s ideas on the subjectivity of consciousness had remained so influential such that 21 years later, Dennett felt the need to make a vigorous response in his article entitled “Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why.” In it, Dennett defends the physicalist and reductionistic approach of the natural sciences that Nagel had criticised. He thinks that Nagel’s requirement to incorporate subjectivity into the study of consciousness has set the bar unnecessarily high. He implies that Nagel has unfairly dismissed the efforts of science and has deliberately created a veil of “mystery” surrounding consciousness through his use of “in principal” arguments. He writes:
We do not require absolute Cartesian certainty that our fellow human beings are conscious—what we require is what is aptly called moral certainty. Can we not have the same moral certainty about the experiences of animals? […] We can learn enough about animal consciousness to settle the questions we have about our responsibilities.[16]
Dennett makes two important points here:
a) We may not be able to know everything about the consciousness of a being, be it man or animal, but we can know enough to be able to act responsibly (i.e. with moral certainty).
b) If behavioural science is good enough for understanding human consciousness, it is good enough for understanding animal consciousness.
Nagel will possibly agree with Dennett’s first point. Nagel does admit that it might not be possible to describe completely the experience of a being even with an objective phenomenology, holding only the expectation that it can “at least in part”[17] do the job, while everyone can agree that more knowledge about man and animals will allow us to act more responsibly towards them. However, Nagel will disagree on Dennett’s second point. A purpose of Nagel’s article is to highlight the deficiencies in behavioural science for both the study of human and animal consciousness. Behavioural science, in his opinion, is not ‘good enough’ for either.
To pick apart Nagel’s argument, Dennett draws our attention to the inconsistency of Nagel’s starting position in his paper, where Nagel employed “third-person scientific facts” by assuming that bats are indeed conscious and that their consciousness differs from the consciousness of human beings. Dennett argues that Nagel’s methodological inconsistency indicates the value of the scientific analysis of animal consciousness: “If a few such facts can establish something about bat consciousness, would more such facts not establish more?”[18] Far from fatal, what this charge does is highlight the difficulties in addressing the topic of consciousness. Nagel needed to start somewhere in his analysis and he deliberately selected the mammalian bat because he felt that it would be generally accepted that such an animal is on par with “mice or pigeons or whales”[19] in terms of the existence of its conscious experience or the lack thereof. He intentionally avoided selecting insects or fish since the ‘lower’ the species, the more doubtful the existence of their consciousness.
Dennett implies that Nagel’s views on the subjectivity and hence inadequacy of the scientific approach to conscious experience have held back scientific research and progress on consciousness. Dennett argues that precisely because of our moral responsibilities towards animals, we need to research further into animal consciousness, both scientifically and conceptually.[20] Nagel will sympathise with this view, but he believes that the natural sciences, with its inclination towards physicalist reductionistic explanations, is not simply insufficient—it is misguided.
Curiously, Dennett’s example of Cog, MIT’s humanoid robot, far from damaging Nagel’s argument, aids it. According to Dennett, Cog’s human-like movements create a sense that we are dealing with a conscious sentient being even when we know that it is simply an electromechanical object. This speaks precisely to the problem of just using behaviour as a proxy or tool to gain insights into consciousness, since behaviour may indicate consciousness when there is none. Dennett does not recognise this problem. He instead writes that the observations of the actions of animals and even robots are “our best guide” to the consciousness of these entities.[21]
Another thing that Dennett gets backwards is how he believes we need to first have a theory that focuses on human consciousness and then use what is learnt there to then understand animals.[22] It can be argued that the study of consciousness is mainly focused on human beings, and one of the main aims of studying animal consciousness is to use it to inform the study of human consciousness.[23] Indeed, I postulate that one of Nagel’s aim in writing “What it is Like to be a Bat” is not so much his desire to understand bat consciousness but to illustrate the difficulties of understanding human consciousness by selecting an example of an animal vastly different from man but yet complex enough to be considered to be a conscious being.
However, in Dennett’s view, to have consciousness is to have an “informational organisation” that provides cognitive powers such as reflection and re-representation. He claims that human beings exclusively have this organisation though he admits that other species may have “somewhat similar organisations” even if we cannot imagine what that would look like. He makes this claim because he believes that not all sentient beings have consciousness, and we might not be able to distinguish between such beings “merely reacting (to a pin stuck into it) and actually feeling (pain).” He even goes further to distinguish pain and suffering in the postscript to his article, suggesting that snakes lack the “over-arching, long-term organisation that leaves room for significant suffering.”[24] Here, he straw man Nagel’s argument by suggesting that a bat might possess only a low-level consciousness or none at all, similiar to that of a snake which might not have consciousness since they are incapable of suffering. However, Nagel uses a bat only as a case of an animal sufficiently complex such that most thinkers would accept that it has consciousness. He could have easily chosen a bonobo, bear or dolphin to make his arguments since ‘higher’ animals will more easily be considered as conscious beings, though those animals would present a less stark contrast with man, which is the opposite effect Nagel was going for.
Dennett does have a valid point though, when he criticises Nagel for not examining the literature on the neuroscience of bats. He cites Kathleen Atkins who published her findings some 19 years after Nagel’s paper. In it, she shows that bats may not have a point of view and hence consciousness. Bats have the neural apparatus to carry out “low level processing” but Dennett suggests that they might not have any system “elevating merely unconscious neural processes to consciousness.” He grants though that bats may be able to form judgements and suggests that the location in the bat’s anatomy where this process happens should also be where scientific investigative efforts should be directed.[25] I would agree with him here, that philosophers of mind need necessarily understand the developments in cognitive science, neurology, psychology and related disciplines to better formulate and explicate their theories.
Dennett returns once again to the strategy of ‘if a method of investigation is good enough for human beings, it is good enough for studying animals.’ In his example of how carrion smells to a vulture, he states that if we are “patient and inquisitive” enough in our investigations, we will be able to learn the “reactive dispositions” and “memory effects” of the vulture and hence learn how carrion smells to it, in the same way that such modes of investigations tell us how something smells to a man.[26] This assertion is indeed odd, since it is precisely Nagel’s point that smell would belong to the realm of subjective experiences. Should this subjective experience be reduced to an objective account in the way Dennett suggests, it would lose the essence of what it is trying to describe since such a description is only possible if it contains the singular point of view of a man, or at most, his species.
Conclusion
In the philosophical conversation Dennett is having with Nagel, they are unfortunately speaking past each other. Dennett seems to lump Nagel together with what he calls the “lunatic fringes of the animal rights movement,”[27] which is unfair since Nagel’s article is not about bat or animal welfare. Nagel’s example of a bat is merely a vehicle to highlight the inadequacy of the scientific approach to the study of the consciousness of bats, and by extension, the consciousness of other animals, Martians and human beings.
He objects to the reductionistic physicalist approach typical of science while Dennett defends the approach, insisting it remains the best way. Dennett advocates that scientists persist with behavioural studies, interpreting them using the theory of evolution to achieve “moral certainty” concerning animal consciousness. In addition, he speculates that consciousness might turn out, based on this scientific approach, not to be a “property” after all.[28] Dennett does have a valid point when he implies that philosophical approaches to the study of consciousness should be informed by the latest developments in science concerning cognition, psychology and neurology. Nagel does not deny that. What he does say is that such a scientific approach is not the last word on the matter concerning consciousness. The fact that science is unable to incorporate the subjective nature of consciousness means that alternative approaches are required. This is why he proposed a phenomenological approach. Such an approach has indeed been adopted to great effect by the likes of Husserl and Sartre, and continues to find new and fertile ground to rake over when applied to the study of consciousness. As such, in the conversation between Dennett and Nagel, Nagel’s position is more reasonable and hence he deserves the last word on the matter: “It seems […] likely […] that mental-physical relations will eventually be expressed in a theory whose fundamental terms cannot be placed clearly in either category.”[29]
Bibliography
Dennett, Daniel C. “Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why.” Social Research 62, no 3 (1995): 691–710.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Translated by Rudolf Bernet and Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.
Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no 4 (1974): 435–50. doi: 10.2307/2183914.
Wells, David A. “Principles of Taxation.” Popular Science Monthly (1898): 354-372. https://books.google.be/books?id=2iIDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA289&hl=nl&pg=
PA289#v=onepage&q&f=false
[1] Howard Robinson, “Dualism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, last modified July 25, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/dualism/.
[2] Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?,” The Philosophical Review 83, no 4 (1974): 435, doi: 10.2307/2183914.
[3] Ibid., 435.
[4] Ibid., 438.
[5] Ibid., 436-37.
[6] Ibid., 436.
[7] Ibid., 438-39.
[8] Ibid., 440.
[9] Ibid., 440-43.
[10] Ibid., 444.
[11] Ibid., 444-45.
[12] Ibid., 446, 449.
[13] Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. Rudolf Bernet and Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 164.
[14] Lester Embree, “Phenomenological Movement,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge, accessed December 15, 2018, doi: 10.4324/9780415249126-DD075-1.
[15] Christina Howells, “Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80),” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge, accessed December 15, 2018, doi: 10.4324/9780415249126-DD062-1.
[16] Daniel C. Dennett, “Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why,” Social Research 62, no 3 (1995): 693,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971115.
[17] Nagel, “What Like a Bat,” 449.
[18] Dennett, “Animal Consciousness,” 693.
[19] Nagel, “What Like a Bat,” 438.
[20] Dennett, “Animal Consciousness,” 693, 706.
[21] Ibid., 693–95.
[22] Ibid., 700.
[23] cf. David A. Wells, “Principles of Taxation,” Popular Science (1898): 372, https://books.google.be/books?id=
2iIDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA289&hl=nl&pg=PA289#v=onepage&q&f=false.
[24] Dennett, “Animal Consciousness,” 703, 707.
[25] Ibid., 703–4.
[26] Ibid., 705; Dennett seems to have conflated smell and taste in the second paragraph, first discussing the smell of roast turkey to him and then its taste and then back to its smell.
[27] Ibid., 692.
[28] Ibid., 706.
[29] Nagel, “What Like a Bat,” 449–50; fn. 15.
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