Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Nagel

Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) taught for decades at New York University, where he is now emeritus. His 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” handed the field its most quoted phrase: there is “something it is like” to be a conscious creature. With the phrase came the framework that still defines the problem — a subjective character of experience, which third-person physical descriptions systematically fail to capture. Nagel has never quite accepted physicalism, but he has done more than almost anyone to define what physicalism has to explain.

Major Works

  • “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review, 1974) — subjective character of experience; the canonical hard-problem paper before there was a name for it
  • Mortal Questions (1979) — essays on death, war, luck, and the limits of objective understanding
  • The View from Nowhere (1986) — the objective/subjective divide developed into a full philosophical system
  • “Subjective and Objective” (1979, in Mortal Questions) — the epistemological dimension of the objective/subjective gap
  • Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (2012) — the most controversial work; rejection of standard physicalism in favor of teleological naturalism

Key Positions

The subjective character of experience. Nagel’s central contribution: there is something it is like to be a bat — to echolocate, to hang upside down in the dark, to navigate by reflected sound. That phrase names the phenomenal character of experience. Nagel’s argument: no physical description of the bat’s brain, however complete, captures this subjective character. Physical descriptions aspire to objectivity, to facts that hold from any point of view. The subjective character of experience remains essentially perspectival: what the experience is from the inside, where no outside view reaches. Nagel offers this not as a technical argument against physicalism but as an invitation to notice a feature of experience that physicalist theories tend to lose sight of.

The objective/subjective divide. The View from Nowhere develops the bat-paper insight into a full account of the tension between two modes of understanding. Physical science advances by progressively stripping away the perspectival: the history of science consists largely in discovering which features of experience belong to the object and which belong to the subject. The objective view is the view from nowhere in particular. But consciousness stays obstinately perspectival: no view from nowhere exists from which subjective experience shows up as just another natural fact. This tension runs through epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, not just the philosophy of mind.

Mind and Cosmos. Nagel’s most provocative work: the standard materialist-Darwinian picture of the universe, in which consciousness arises from the blind operations of physical laws on biological material, cannot be right. The problem is not just consciousness but reason, value, and the objective-seeming character of mathematical and moral knowledge. Nagel proposes that the universe has a kind of teleological structure, a tendency toward the emergence of minds that can understand it, which standard physics doesn’t capture. He does not defend theism; he defends something more like panpsychism or panprotopsychism, though he leaves the positive account deliberately open.

My View

The bat paper serves the book throughout as an indispensable tool. “What is it like” points vividly at what needs explaining: the phenomenal character of experience, the felt quality of seeing red or tasting coffee. Nagel found the locution that makes the problem undeniable. Whatever else one thinks about his conclusions, his articulation of the target is exactly right.

The book parts ways with Nagel over what the subjective character of experience implies. The bat paper fixes the target with unmatched clarity, but it does not by itself establish that phenomenal facts fall outside the physical. The later Nagel increasingly treats the objective/subjective divide as evidence that the materialist framework cannot accommodate mind. My view locates the divide in our modes of access: description and acquaintance reach one fact by different routes.

Mind and Cosmos makes the stronger disagreement explicit. Nagel takes the explanatory difficulty as evidence that the standard materialist picture lacks something in nature and may need teleological principles. The book instead combines the identity claim with the acquaintance-recognition account. Phenomenal character consists in the complete world-presenting intentional profile; acquaintance explains why no description alone confers the first-person recognitional capacity. That leaves a real epistemic gap without adding teleological features to the universe.

Nagel sees what the problem is more clearly than almost anyone. Where I part from him is on what it implies. See The Hard Problem of Consciousness and Physicalism.