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  • Essay / What It's Like to Be a Bat Versus Thomas Nagel Essay

    In today's society, the mind is a set of cognitive elements that enable consciousness, perception , the thought, judgment and memory of an individual. Additionally, without our minds and/or conscious experiences, a person would not be able to understand what makes them who they are. Similarly, in Thomas Nagel's essay "What It's Like to Be a Bat", Nagel argues that while there is something that it means to be an organism, humans are not able to fully know what it means to be a bat. Additionally, Nagel supports his claims with the importance of an organism's conscious experiences, memories, and knowledge that allow an individual to identify. Therefore, in this article I will discuss Nagel's argument which according to me, in line with the analogy argument, even though an individual may experience the same sensations or feelings as me, it does not mean that we we share the same conscious experiences. For example, consider the conscious experiences between a blind man and a man with normal vision who participate in the same routines and/or activities throughout their day. In this scenario, both men cannot claim to know what it means to be the other person based on their different experiences with their sense of vision. In other words, the man who has normal eyesight is generally able to understand what he is reading, eating or doing at any given time of the day. However, for the blind person, they do not have the ability to rely on their sense of vision to understand what activities they are participating in. Therefore, although both men have the ability to understand how each other's senses work and/or feel, their experiences of vision, taste, smell, touch, and hearing can only be shared. with themselves and no one else. For this reason, Nagel would say that both men could not know what it means to be the other person due to the lack of prior knowledge, memories, or acquaintances..