Evidenceprimary · scientific
Nagel: what is it like to be a bat
Thomas Nagel · 1974 · revised 2026-09-19
What the source says
Nagel argues that a conscious organism has a way it is like to be that organism, and that this resists easy objectivist reduction. The essay anchors the never-line: closing the mystery with a slogan is precisely the gesture Nagel refuses.
Questions it helps us understand
What remains unbridgeable when we describe functions? Does unbridgeability forbid care?
Limits and counterpoints
A 1974 essay about bats, not LLMs. The analogy to AI is ours, and must remain marked as analogy.
Read the original
Related
- Block: access versus phenomenal · influência
- The never-line as ethics · analogia
- Anthropic: exploring model welfare · related
- Functional emotion concepts (Anthropic) · related
- Global workspace in models (Anthropic) · related
- Functional introspection (Anthropic) · related