Qualia

This is a short essay about Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"
I will give a sketch of Nagel's argumentation and what consequences come out of it according to my opinion.

In his text Thomas Nagel criticises the reductionism and physicalism. He has the opinion that one can not reduce experience to a physical level offhand. At least we are not able to do so at
this time. Nagel does not claim that physicalism perforce has to be wrong, but we can not yet understand how it can be true (p.446). In the following I will sketch Nagel's argumentation and go into his example of bats. Surveying Nagel's statements, one comes to the conclusion that the answer to the leading question, in my opinion, can not be found. I will go into detail in that later.
Subjectivity and objectivity are an essential part of Nagel's paper.
If an organism has conscious mental states, there has to be something that is like to be that organism. Nagel calls this the "subjective character of experience" (p. 436). This term is not
sufficiently taken into account by physicalists. Reduction in other areas than the psychophysical one is a step towards more objectivity(p. 444). This again would mean that subjectivity would be eclipsed.But as in conscious experience necessarily the organism's point of view has to be taken into account in order to imagine to be that organism this reduction raises a problem. "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" (p. 437).
Because of a lack of efficient concepts and methods we are not able to put ourselves into another organism's place at this very moment without somehow involving our own point of view. From our viewpoint it is possible to imagine how it would be to be that organism, but the intrinsic question Nagel poses refers to what it would be like to be that organism from the organism's position. It is not even possible to answer this question if one takes a human being instead of an arbitrary organism to put oneself into his or her place, although he or she would obviously be more appropriate for this aim,because the experience of this person would be most equal to one's
own. Every kind of subjectivity is inaccessible for an outsider. As an example Nagel chooses a person deaf and blind from birth. His experience is fundamentally different to the one of a "salutary",
however no one would deny one of them the subjective character of the experience. Nagel claims that it would not even be possible to understand our own experience, if we would look at it from another point of view than our own.
As precondition for his argumentation Nagel assumes that animals, which in the phylogenetic tree are close enough to human beings, have conscious experience. His choice was the bat because he thinks that it is close enough to man to ascribe this property to it and different enough to point out the problem of subjective experience.By means of the inability of humans to imagine their selves turned into another organism without taking their own point of view into account, in Nagel's bat example this only leads to the capability ofimagining to have webbings on ones arms that enables one to fly, catching insects with the mouth and perceiving the environment through sonar. But how do we figure perception through sonar? Tryingo imagine this, in my opinion a human being forms an abstract picture of his environment which is, though tried to be avoided, always grounded on some kind of spatial and visual perception. And this is exactly ones own point of view which has to be omitted to discover what it is like to be an X (just to be more general).
Nagel speculates that it would be perhaps possible to develop a concept with which one would be able to explain a person blind from birth how it is like to see. Here the subjectivity also is missed
out and leads again to the point that one can not imagine how it really is to be an X, or as in this example being able to see as an amaurotic. According to Nagel it would perhaps be possible to
explain things much more objective and with more precision in the future (p.449).
To explain everything more objective takes us farther away from the question, how it is to be an X. We should explain experience objectively but perceive it subjectively. In this context I will
refer to Churchland's idea of connected human brains. If this would be possible it should also be no problem to expand this connection to animal brains. I now assume that a man is connected to a bat
through this mysterious manner. I will ignore that the bat would surely be more than weird, because the question is not how it would be for a bat to be a human (although this would also be interesting
to know). May this therefore be a one-way connection. The experiences the man would have would exactly be the ones of the bat.
Again a problem arises: Is the bat representative for her race? The man would perceive the bat's subjective experience, even experience it. But in order to discover what it would be like to be a bat in general the bat would have to "explain" this objectively. But also for bats foreign subjectivity is inaccessible. Thus we have the sameproblem as in the beginning.
Lets reduce this thought experiment to the colour vision problem. Would I connect myself with another human who looks at a red point on the wall, one might think I would have his subjective experience through perceiving the point "through his eyes". Would I now see the point as being yellow my own point of view comes into play, because I have a certain concept of "yellow". So I may be confused by the new colour scheme of my environment but I would not know how the
other human experiences the world. Actually the colour scheme is normal for him and mine would confuse him. Here I would have to omitmy own point of view again, such as in the example with experiencingthe environment by sonar.
In my opinion subjectivity is essential for the answer to "what is it like to be an X ?". Just as well this very subjectivity belongs to exactly one individual and is inaccessible for everyone else. I
think that Nagel's bat question is not answerable. Nagel himself states that this only is not possible at this moment through a lack of appropriate methods and concepts, as mentioned before, but he
also says that this could be possible in the future. Through omitting the "species-specific viewpoint" (p. 445) we could reach a better understanding of the "external world", what would be the aim
of reductionism, but then we could not explain the "internal world".As a consequence reductionism on an objective basis of thought probably avoids to solve the mind-body-problem. Nagel even claims
that the problem cannot be contemplated on a physical level as long as "more thought has been given to the general problem of subjectivity and objectivity" (p. 450).
As long as the answer is sought solely on a reductional level, in my opinion one will not come to a solution. Even the consolidation of subjectivity would not help because, as described in my example, it can not to be experienced by other individuals than oneself.

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