"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable"
About this Quote
Nagel is pointing to the feature of mind that refuses to be flattened into the third-person language of science: the subjective feel of experience. Thoughts, pains, the redness of red, the taste of coffee each have a what-it-is-like character available only from the first-person point of view. The mind-body problem asks how such mental phenomena relate to the brain and the body. Reductionist answers say that mental states just are physical states. Nagel argues that consciousness is the stumbling block because a complete physical description still seems to leave out the felt aspect, the inner presence that makes a state conscious at all.
His classic example is the bat. We can learn everything objective about echolocation and bat neurophysiology, yet we still lack access to what it is like to navigate the world by sonar. That gap is not a gap in data but a structural gap between viewpoints. The physical sciences achieve objectivity by discarding perspective; consciousness is constituted by perspective. No wonder the usual methods struggle: they explain functions, behaviors, and correlations, but the light of experience itself seems to elude capture.
Nagel does not endorse traditional dualism. He suspects that current physicalism is incomplete and that our concepts will need to expand so that the objective viewpoint can include the subjective without abolishing it. Later philosophers would call this the explanatory gap and the hard problem of consciousness, both developments that echo Nagel’s diagnosis. By calling the problem really intractable, he is not declaring it hopeless, but warning that the impasse will remain until we can reconcile first-person and third-person standpoints in a principled way.
The remark is a methodological challenge. If consciousness is real and irreducible to mere function, then any theory of mind must make room for the reality of experience. Until it does, the mind-body problem stays stuck at the very place where mind most resists being turned into matter.
His classic example is the bat. We can learn everything objective about echolocation and bat neurophysiology, yet we still lack access to what it is like to navigate the world by sonar. That gap is not a gap in data but a structural gap between viewpoints. The physical sciences achieve objectivity by discarding perspective; consciousness is constituted by perspective. No wonder the usual methods struggle: they explain functions, behaviors, and correlations, but the light of experience itself seems to elude capture.
Nagel does not endorse traditional dualism. He suspects that current physicalism is incomplete and that our concepts will need to expand so that the objective viewpoint can include the subjective without abolishing it. Later philosophers would call this the explanatory gap and the hard problem of consciousness, both developments that echo Nagel’s diagnosis. By calling the problem really intractable, he is not declaring it hopeless, but warning that the impasse will remain until we can reconcile first-person and third-person standpoints in a principled way.
The remark is a methodological challenge. If consciousness is real and irreducible to mere function, then any theory of mind must make room for the reality of experience. Until it does, the mind-body problem stays stuck at the very place where mind most resists being turned into matter.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), The Philosophical Review — commonly cited source for the line "Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable." |
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