Thomas Nagel
Philosopher of Mind
About
Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) is an American philosopher whose 1974 essay 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' gave consciousness studies its sharpest definition: an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism. The essay argued that no amount of objective, physical description captures the subjective character of experience — a challenge that predates and frames the hard problem. His later work, including The View from Nowhere, explores the tension between subjective and objective standpoints across ethics and epistemology.
Key Contributions
- Defined consciousness as 'something it is like to be' an organism (1974) — the field's most durable formulation
- Argued that objective physical description cannot capture subjective experience
- Framed the subjective/objective tension in The View from Nowhere (1986)
- Set the stage for Chalmers' hard problem two decades before it was named
- Kept philosophy honest about the limits of third-person science on first-person facts
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Papers & Publications
Connections
David Chalmers
InfluencedPhilosopher of Mind
'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness' (1995) takes its central term straight from Nagel: 'As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.' Nagel had argued that no objective description reaches the subjective character of experience; Chalmers gave that residue a name — the hard problem — and a place in the architecture of the debate, which is why the bat essay reads today like a hard problem posed twenty years early.
consc.net · doi.org
Daniel Dennett
DebatedPhilosopher & Cognitive Scientist
Nagel reviewed From Bacteria to Bach and Back in the New York Review of Books (2017) under the title 'Is Consciousness an Illusion?' and answered his own question: the reality of one's own consciousness is the one thing one cannot be deluded about. Dennett holds the opposite — the felt inner show is a user illusion the brain runs on itself. This site's question 'What is consciousness?' sets their two cuts side by side, because between them there is no third position.
nybooks.com
Annaka Harris
InfluencedAuthor & Consciousness Researcher
Conscious (2019) takes Nagel's 1974 formula as its ground floor — an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism — and then presses where Nagel stopped. If we cannot say which arrangements of matter that is true of, panpsychism stops looking absurd and starts looking like an open question. She writes as a guide rather than an advocate, but the tour keeps returning to the bat.
Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (2019) · sloww.co · doi.org
