Thomas Nagel · "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" · 1974
The bat perceives the world by echolocation: it emits cries and reads in their echoes the shape, distance and motion of things. A biologist can describe that system completely, down to the last neuron. But it would remain to be known what it is, for the bat, to perceive in this way. And we can imagine it only by imagining ourselves as a bat, which is not the same thing: that would be what it is like for a human being to behave as it does, not what it is like for the bat to be itself.
Would a completed science of the bat's brain tell us what it is like to be one?
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