a draft analysis of Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” see: io - nate thomas nagel
an overview: sentiments and straw men
I’m disappointed – (not that Nagel shared these thoughts before I was born) – but that these talking points are still considered to be so important 1.
Nagel sets out his position early:
“consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong” — Nagel
“philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible, in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different” — Nagel
“it seems hopeless” — Nagel
The remainder of Nagel’s discussion rides this perverse sense of futility and apathy down; though I note, that I generally agree with the phenomenal space Nagel points to in his caveats, but not always his assessment of that space – “perhaps a new theoretical form can be derived for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future” (farkin’ ’ell mate. What Nagel is describing here, is a consequence of insufficiently unsentimentally re-evaluating fundamental priors of formal education. Once formally conditioned to think in a certain fundamental ways, it is very difficult to perceive alternatives)
“aside: i think what it is I’m disappointed about, is the apparent failure of sufficient individuals within the endeavour to organise around the idea of ‘a fresh look at the space’
Aside from the dogmatic traditions, I can’t think of another space where this failure to adapt could go on so long without correction. The unwavering conclusion that – ‘if we can’t figure this out now, it must be really intractable’; and not – ’er, perhaps lets see about a different approach’ (implicit, redefine the problem space, because simply iterating approaches within the same problem space, is absolutely not equivalent (and demonstrates lack of contextual awareness, or a failure of imagination)”
Following, Nagel’s arguments appear to suffer a blinkered view of the problem space; and perhaps, are shaped by conflating ‘reduction as it is today’ with ’the space of possible reduction’ – or the map Nagel is familiar with, for the territory, and the space of possible future maps.
“Any reductionist program has to to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced” — Nagel
Then call the method something else, and focus on the identification of constituent phenomena, and build up, such that the eventual outcome is then able to be reduced, to newly identified phenomena (surely this is the case at some point? Material foundations were already fairly well defined, the rest is identification of relative intermediate level?)
“If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed” — Nagel
More is different – all phenomena are ‘constituents + compositional delta’ 2. One (absolutely) valid problem to pose – ‘how might compositional delta to established priors result in what we call consciousness’, but long before that, we ought to be able to align constituent phenomena with physical foundations, and downstream consequences (see the map for the an introduction for visual intuitions)
To make the point: one does not write the reverse-engineered specification (outcome) until after one has reverse-engineered; which initially involves focus on constituents in isolation, to known primitives, then aligned, then overall specification finalised.
“it is useless to base the defence of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. for there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness” — Nagel
3 Even within the perspective Nagel later demonstrates, the mystery of consciousness can only be some delta to ‘material formations across levels’, else we invoke magic (gist #1)
By incrementally increasing the number of constituent phenomena materially accounted for, we incrementally decrease ‘what it is that we need an account of consciousness to explain’
We don’t need to to explain basic concerns of biology, nor chemistry, nor physics – take that as a start point. The question then, is defined by ‘what is left to explain having ignored the distraction of consciousness, and built up, and aligned across’ – the very opposite of Nagel’s assertions.
This is the essence of what I refer to as ‘fractional accounting’. When all phenomena are composition, and more is different, the only way to isolate the unique delta of each composition, is to first incrementally account for constituent phenomena (or fractions of the whole)
“we work towards completeness – we don’t give up because we cannot define completeness before we start”
Nagel’s perspective and thinking (and the endeavour, to be fair) appears to suffer the baggage of earlier times – “we’re so special, are you really suggesting that we ought to be able to solve this problem by equating ourselves to lesser forms?!”
For some reason, Nagel’s top-down framing of perspective seems blind to phenomenal constituents; or unwilling to acknowledge that constituents implicated in our perspective can possibly be the same as those of others – perspectives too are composition, of constituents, so arranged
An important shift occurs when considering evolutionary phenomenal change from the bottom-up (as opposed to top-down) – the question of “how do you prove that isolated phenomena are the same?” is replace by “what grounds do you have for suggesting that constituent phenomena (which align across contexts) are different?”