Conscious Experience: Subjective vs. Objective

In Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”, he states that for one to be aware of  conscious experience, one must know the difference between two types of conception, subjective and objective. Nagel says that for an animal to have conscious experience at all means that there is something that is like to be that animal (“Bat” 1). Not only is being that animal enough, but also what the experience is like for the animal itself. This is known as the subjective character of experience (“Bat” 1).

When one tries to comprehend another species experience they are only using one point of view, which is usually what they imagine the animal would feel or be like in that experience. However simply imagining the behaviors that a certain species does, doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what it is really like to be that animal and the experience they face. Nagel says, “…every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view” (“Bat” 2). For a human to truly understand another species experience, they need to stop imagining what it would be like for them if they were in a situation and focus on what it is like for the actual animal going through it. To clearly show this Nagel uses the example of a bat. He says that if a human really wants to understand what it is like to be a bat, they must stop thinking what would it be like if they were a bat, but instead focus on what it is like for a bat to be a bat. This is how the objective view comes into play because we would have difficulty understanding another species’ experiences without taking up their point of view. Nagel says that even though species have different point of views, certain concepts can still be apprehended because even though we comprehend things differently, we can still get some basic idea of the experience if we shift from using properties only known to human senses and expanding beyond that  (“Bat” 5). He says, “The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description (“Bat” 5). And if humans were to use a more objective approach they would understand more what is it is like to be another species, and not just them as another species.

However do you think it is possible to truly get an objective point of view on an experience for another species, if there is no similarity between the two species at all?