ABSTRACT
Many major philosophical works are old relative to scientific contributions. Thus, it may be surprising to the reader that a modern classic was published already in 1974, by philosophy Professor Thomas Nagel. Nagel describes the sensory systems and the life of bats – and he chooses bats because people are generally willing to concede that bats have conscious experiences – to argue that bat experience is beyond what we can imagine. Bat sonar, or their ability to attach meaning to their high frequency shrieks and the corresponding echoes the environment gives as feedback, is something fundamentally alien to us. He argues that trying to imagine webbing on one's arms, hanging upside down in the attic, having very poor vision, and so on will not help in understanding what it is like to be a bat. It will only reflect what it is like to be a human, imagining what it is like to be a bat.
