I think it depends on what you’re doing. Sometimes staying vague is the right move, and sometimes writing a ten page contract that leaves no room for misunderstanding is the way to go. Particularly if they’re one of those genies that look for ways to misinterpret your wish.
1 Like
Agreed. Representation is part of communication, which is a goal directed enterprise. We only need be as clear as the context requires.
OK, this helps me understand better. But I would suggest we just drop the idea of a “perfect description” (which Nagel never asks for) and go with the idea that being a bat does feel like something, or a series of somethings. Ideally, if we could gather them all, we’d know what it is to be a bat. But we probably can’t. Again, I agree the question is largely rhetorical and the problem difficult, but I wouldn’t say that’s down to ambiguity. We know what we mean, we just can’t achieve it.
Well, yes! I take the question to be asking why some creation event (I’m using “creation” neutrally to refer to the start of it all) occurred. If it hadn’t occurred, there wouldn’t be anything – which you can denote as “nothing” but then you get tangled up in nominalism etc. I find this a really dull problem, but setting up “nothing” as “an object in the world” is just a mistake, not an ambiguity.
What do you mean “feels like something”? I am certain it feels similar to something. Depending on how imaginative, poetic, and familiar with bats I was, I could come up with more or less helpful examples of what it is similar to. Maybe instead you mean “bats experience the world”. If that’s all you mean, I don’t see where the philosophical problem arises.
The problem comes when you mean both things at the same time and don’t realize it.
What a bat experiences doesn’t imply what a bat is. What it is to be a bat is to be a winged mammal of the order Chiroptera. The logic here, obviously nonsensical when laid bare, is that if it were possible to “know everything” about what a bat experiences, it would make us a bat. It’s the same flawed reasoning as Mary’s room. Knowledge and experience are not interchangeable.
Treating “nothing” like it is something in itself, rather than a description of our imagination or expectation seems like ambiguity to me. If we didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t exist. Nothing more to that truism is required.
Not quite, though that’s a good distinction to draw. Maybe I can appeal to the idea of “what it feels like to be Dobbler.” I trust that concept is meaningful for you? If so, would you agree that it isn’t the same thing as whether “feeling like Dobbler” is similar to some other feeling?
Bats, you, and I all “experience the world,” but Nagel’s question isn’t quite about that, I would say.
That does sound nonsensical, but how is it the logic here? I wasn’t suggesting I’d become a bat if I knew all the many ways it feels like to be a bat. Perhaps the phrase “what it is to be a bat” was confusing (indeed, ambiguous!). All I meant by that was, we’d have the (impossible) answer to Nagel’s question about the subjectivity of a bat. Remember, Nagel wasn’t asking it in hopes of a reply. He was arguing for its coherence, not its answerability.
OK, I can see it that way.
Amusing takeaway from all this: “Ambiguity” is clearly ambiguous, as we both read different things out of it! 
In some sense you have only to ask whether there is a difference between a cat and a dog. If essentialism is wrong and species don’t exist, then of course there is no difference. One can of course say this, but to believe it turns out to be quite difficult.
If one builds their whole philosophical edifice on an antagonism towards essentialism (as has been common since at least the time of Hume), then they will of course find real difficulties in essentialist doctrines. But if one begins from a neutral starting point and simply inquires into reality, then I think they will adopt one form of essentialism or another. They will accept the existence of species, for example. They will say that the species ‘cat’ and the species ‘dog’ name real forms that do not exist only in the human mind, and that these two forms are different.
Regarding ambiguity, I don’t find empiricists to favor it in any special way. Locke, for example, is not given to ambiguity.
Yes, there is a difference between this cat and this dog, mostly based in relatedness, with species, but this isn’t the same thing as an essence. An essence is invariable, eternal, and in the Platonic sense is the literal cause of the forms of the cat and the dog. The manifest particular cats and dogs are shadows on a cave wall, the particular example, as opposed to the things themselves, or the eternal forms. It is about which is primary, and which is derivative. Did we derive the category from experience, in some manner, or is the category a glimpse at a higher reality, a logical structure that exists prior to, and is the cause of the particular instantiations? Viewed as eternal, and existing from the beginning of time, allowing for the deduction of the current forms of life right now, from the initial conditions of the universe, or, did the species emerge from an evolutionary process, and isn’t derived from a pre-existing form that would allow the prediction and deduction of cats or dogs from the universe before they emerged? That is what is at stake in the rationalism vs empiricism conflict. Rationalism dominated philosophy for most of history, but has been largely supplanted over the last century and a half.
1 Like
So you are taking “essentialism” to mean “Platonic essentialism.” Platonic essentialism is quite rare. The more common form of essentialism is Aristotelian essentialism. This is what usually goes by that name, and this would be the most charitable interpretation of someone who favors essentialism. What I said about cats and dogs has to do with (Aristotelian) essentialism, not Platonic essentialism.
Note too that some 2500 years ago Aristotle said that essences were “derived from experience.” So I don’t accept the idea that “rationalism dominated philosophy for most of history,” if by “rationalism” you mean something like Platonic essentialism.
(Gyula Klima’s SEP entry on the history of the problem of universals is fairly good on this.)
Yes, because Nagel’s question is grounded in ambiguity.
Let’s start here for a second. If I say “I know how you feel” there is a bunch of things implicit in that, maybe 10% intentionally omitted for concision, and the other 90% just unexamined assumptions. When I say that, I mean that based on your linguistic behavior, I assume there is a physiologically similar human on the other side of the keyboard, and I assume that our similar physiology implies that we experience the world in a pretty similar way, and then the way you speak about something reminds me of a similar situation I was in and I remember how I felt, and it is consistent with your behavior, so likely… you feel the same or sufficiently similar to how I did. I obviously don’t mean that I possess telepathy and can directly experience the feelings you have. Similarly, I can tell you about my experience, and depending on my cleverness I might be more or less evocative, but obviously you can’t have my exact experiences, because you aren’t me.
It isn’t controversial that people and mammals experience the world. It isn’t controversial that our ability to relate to or imagine the experiences of others is powerful, and our ability to communicate is predicated on the notion that we have “shared” experiences, but the scare quotes are there for a reason. They aren’t really shared, they are just imagined to be equivalent. So we can imagine experiences that we had that we think might be equivalent to what a bat has. I imagine that mammals all experience pain pretty similarly. But that’s just an informed imagining, not actually feeling the bat’s pain. So “what it’s like” to be a bat, me, you or what or whomever, is an attempt to imagine the others experience, not to have the experience. To me, it’s not “like something” to be me, it’s just me being me. Isn’t it that way with you?
Okay, but if we take the ambiguity out, isn’t the claim “to experience the world as a bat, you have to be a bat”? It’s not really philosophically interesting when presented unambiguously, is it?
Aristotle held essences to be necessary, and not contingent. A thing’s essence flows directly from its definition, and is logically and physically necessary. It’s causal. The issue is primacy, Plato is more like who I attribute the tradition ultimately to, rather than requiring total agreement on all points. The primacy, logical necessity, and causal parts are the big things.
I would push back and say that Aristotle rejects the primacy, “necessity,” and causality of Platonic Forms. In fact he rejects the very existence of Platonic Forms.
So Aristotle says that the difference between a dog and a cat is the fact that a dog has a dog-form and a cat has a cat-form, and we know about these mind-independent forms through experience. The form does not exist in a Platonic realm, but rather in particular cats and dogs. When you hear contemporary philosophers denouncing essentialism, this is what they are denouncing. They inevitably also disagree with Platonic essentialism, but that is not much of a live option these days.
Interestingly, there has been a shift in biological taxonomy over the past century or so. Historically, taxonomy was done based almost completely on morphology. Now that we understand genetics, that has become a more primary determinant in taxonomy. The animals didn’t change, but their taxonomy did.
No, that is not at all what the question is asking. The question, or, rather, our inability to answer the question, demonstrates that consciousness is subjective, and cannot be known objectively. We can know every physical fact about the bat, and we will not know what it is like to be a bat.
Of course, this assumes a bat has conscious mental states. That there is something it is like to be a bat - something it is like for the bat. That a bat has a subjective poof view. Nagel chose the bat because it is enough like us that (maybe?) most assume it does. They are mammals, as are we. So our brains have some common structures even aside from the neocortex, which only mammals have.
But the bat is also different enough that we can’t know what it’s like to be over. Flying, catching insects on the wing and eating them, echolocation, hanging upside down to sleep, being only a small fraction of my size… I can try to think about what it would be like for me to do those things and have those characteristics, but no, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be one.
Nothing we can do or learn can make us understands what it’s like to be a bat. That’s what the essay is about.
Aristotle conceived of different kinds of essences, not all are primary, but some are. There is a hierarchy. Essences are not derived from experience though, they are one of the four causes of a thing. Specifically the formal cause. They are not just an abstraction, or formed after the thing comes to exist, by us, but play a casual role in its coming to exist.
What caught my interest some years ago when I read Searle is the ambiguous use of the word ‘experience’ between an intentionalistic sense and a constituitive sense.
The intentionalistic sense concerns the object of an experience (e.g. this text). The constituitive sense concerns the experience of an object (e.g. the perceptual process which enables you to see this text).
The ambiguity arises if you assume that the experience itself, or some element of it, is the primary object of experience.
But then how is knowledge possible? How could you know whether you see this text or an illusion, dream, or hallucination? You could never know for sure. The assumption has made some of the greatest philosophers become skeptics or idealists. Searle argues convincingly that it’s a fallacy of ambiguity.
I think there is often a very big confusion in the difference between any kind of structure, and logical structure particularly. Logos means words, or language. The categories that make up words. Cats and dogs definitely have structures, but they hold no strong relation to categories, or words, or logic. Emergence suggests that the structure or organization causes the property to emergence, but we tend to think that understanding that structure or organization allows for their reproduction. Understanding sharpness, allows for one to reproduce sharpness, in many different things, with varying levels of skill. Complicated or intricate properties we do not understand to the degree we cannot reproduce them. This is a very very different thing than categories, or words, and how they classify and clump things together. Aristotle does have some of that in his philosophy, but Plato isn’t wrong that categories and forms involve better and worse, idealization, and standards either. The issue is just in imagining logic to have a window into underlying structures of the world, that it doesn’t actually.
I’m not sure what sources you are drawing from. Here is SEP:
At this point, we seem to have a clear idea about the nature of substantial form as Aristotle conceives of it. A substantial form is the essence of a substance, and it corresponds to a species. Since it is an essence, a substantial form is what is denoted by the definiens of a definition. Since only universals are definable, substantial forms are universals. That substantial forms are universals is confirmed by Aristotle’s comment, at the end of Ζ.8, that “Socrates and Callias … are distinct because of their matter … but the same in form” (1034a6–8). For them to be the same in form is for them to have the same form, i.e., for one and the same substantial form to be predicated of two different clumps of matter. And being “predicated of many” is what makes something a universal (De Interpretatione 17a37).
The word ‘essence’ comes from Aristotle’s to ti en einai, “literally ‘the what it was to be’ for a thing” (SEP ibid.).
Here is IEP on the experiential nature of Aristotle’s epistemology:
In the mode of discovery one begins with the phenomenon and then seeks to create a causal explanation (PA 646a 25). But how does one go about doing this? In the Posterior Analytics II.19, Aristotle suggests a process of induction that begins with the particular and then moves to the universal. Arriving at the universal entails a comprehensive understanding of some phenomenon. For example, if one wanted to know whether fish sleep, one would first observe fish in their environment. If one of the behaviors of the fish meets the common understanding of sleep (such as being deadened to outside stimulus, showing little to no movement, and so forth), then one may move to the generalization that fish sleep (On Sleeping and Waking 455b 8, cf. On Dreams 458b 9). But one cannot stop there. Once one has determined that fish sleep (via the inductive mode of discovery), it is now up to the researcher to ferret out the causes and reasons why, in a systematic fashion. This second step is the mode of presentation.
Right. You use the phrase “subjectively know” and contrast it with objectively knowing, as if both uses of “know” meant the same thing, like “subjective” and “objective” were just difference means to acquire the knowledge, right? That’s the premise here. The problem is that “know” in “subjectively know” simply means “experiences”, while “know” in “objectively know” means have awareness of facts and a useful theoretical model to describe and understand something. It is not surprising that I can’t have any experiences that aren’t my own. That also implies nothing about my ability to be aware of facts and explanatory models.
This is such a tortured way to speak about it. I think that any biologist would agree that bats experience the world. I would never say “I know what it’s like to be me”, because there’s no information in that sentence that isn’t captured by saying “I experience things”. So I experience things. Bats presumably experience things. I can’t perform telepathy on a bat. None of these statements are philosophically interesting. What does the formulation “what it’s like to be a bat” capture that what I just said doesn’t?
But you just did imagine it. I assume that you meant that your imagination could never perfectly capture every possible aspect of how a bat might experience the world… which is true and unsurprising. Banal. Your imagining also can’t turn you into a bat… which I think is the unspoken, unconscious implication of this language.
Then I think you’re doing what I initially said you would be tempted to do: you are denying that we can make true logical statements about cats and dogs. So if I say, “A cat is not a dog and a dog is not a cat,” then I have made a logical claim about individuals belonging to the species ‘dog’ and the species ‘cat’. If cats and dogs are truly different—in reality and not just in our minds—then surely “logic has a window into the underlying structures of the world.” If ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ do not say anything about the world, and they only say things about our minds, then there is no real difference between cats and dogs—at least not one that is knowable. In that case there would only be a difference within our minds.