Thomas Nagel Revisited

In his highly influential text ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, Thomas Nagel outlined what he saw as the impossibility of experiencing the world from the perspective of other species. In recent years, some designers have attempted to challenge Nagel’s argument, creating objects and experiences which might recreate – or at least speculate upon – the sensory capabilities of other-than-human beings.

Dunne & Raby are among those designers. Their recent project Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival acknowledges our world as a place of multispecies realities, where multiple sensory experiences overlap and coexist among the myriad species on the planet.

For this issue of the Future Observatory Journal, we invited Dunne & Raby to revisit Nagel’s text, providing annotations from a contemporary, design-centred perspective.

Download ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ here and read Dunne & Raby’s annotations below. 

What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 1 1 There are many examples where design and material science enter into dialogue, especially around biomaterials. And social scientists and designers are increasingly collaborating in response to emerging political realities. But points of contact between design and philosophy are less common. This is not at all surprising, but still, is something being missed? We would like to put some of the ideas discussed in this text into conversation with ideas that have surfaced in a recent project of ours, Designs for a World of Many Worlds: After the Festival, and a class we teach with Prof. Dominic Pettman at The New School in New York, both exploring ideas around the more-than-human, or non–human. Our reading, we hope, will be a generative rather than critical. 

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.’ But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H₂0 problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. 2 2 Is design’s equivalent to this to frame, or reduce, every issue to a problem to be solved, regardless of complexity and limits of understanding? Might there be other ways design can connect to seemingly intractable issues beyond solutionist reductionism, even if hypothetical?

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I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life. 3 3 This alienness is important. Bats are not part of our human world, they exist in their own bat reality. The biologist Jakcob von Uexküll called the world each creature experiences through its unique sensory organs an ‘umwelt’. Rather than attempting to make room for non–humans in a human world, would it be more helpful to acknowledge their alienness and the impossibility of ever truly understanding what it is like to be a bat? Celebrating instead, the unknowable and alien through imaginative coexistence by expanding our human imaginations to embrace nonhuman umwelten, or worlds.  

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Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications. 4 4 The sensory apparatus of other beings don’t just ‘see’ things differently, but produce worlds, and even realities, that we cannot begin to comprehend. If we acknowledge that there are ways of seeing and being beyond human imagination we can begin to hint at their existence and the fact that the human world is, perhaps, just one of many. If we are to truly embrace a more-than-human perspective, we could also consider more-than-human ontologies, as speculative as that might be, and the human’s place within them. When we enter this complex world of worlds, perhaps we no longer retain our human shape, made from human stuff. We undergo a figurative, material and conceptual transformation. We take on new forms, new materialities and new meanings. Our presence in these worlds is radically different – maybe even monstrous – to a non-human.  

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On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. 5 5 Of course, an approach like this is full of contradictions. As this paper goes to great lengths to argue, it is impossible to truly imagine what this would be like as we are limited by our human imagination and senses. But we can try. And in the process, shift perspective, embrace the paradoxical, exercise the imagination and, hopefully, begin to see ourselves and the human-made world differently by appreciating the nature of other non-human worlds and realities. Engaging with the more-than-human also opens a door into the post-humanities and discourses that move beyond scientific rationality as the only story.

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Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

So if extrapolation from our own case is involved in the idea of what it is like to be a bat, the extrapolation must be incompletable. 6 6 Extrapolative forms of thought create limitations in design too. Many future scenarios are a form of extrapolation; they start by identifying ‘weak signals’ in present realities and extend them into a plausible future. If the goal is to open the mind and encourage imaginative thought, then extrapolative thought might be too straightforward; the need to be plausible, rational or possible ties it too closely to existing realities. It has its place, but we also need to make imaginative leaps that go beyond already visible pathways. But how do we justify a leap? Could we look to philosophy, literature and the edges of science where hypotheses and questions often mark the start of an investigation rather than existing realities?

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The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It would be fine if someone were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature. 7 7 This is where it gets interesting. We bump up against the limits of a human-shaped imagination and intelligence. There is a larger reality out there that ours is simply a small part of. Imagination can help us inhabit this larger reality better. It can allow us to accept that there are limits to what we can perceive, our phenomenological world, and that beyond this is something more: a world that will probably be forever inaccessible to us. Of course, not all philosophers agree with this, but it can help make a shift away from a purely human-centric imagination.  

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This brings us to the edge of a topic that requires much more discussion than I can give it here: namely, the relation between facts on the one hand and conceptual schemes or systems of representation on the other. My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts. Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend. 8 8 This is an interesting fork in the road for design concerned with ideas. Do designers follow the factual path, and, in a way, stay within the known? Or, do we explore the pathway of ‘conceptual schemes and systems of representation’ that opens up possibilities for counterfactual design and helps us acclimatize to a situation where unknowability and the unimaginable are the normal state? That is not to argue for fantasy (although there is place for that too), but for embracing more intuitive and less grounded forms of imagining that, even if hypothetical, can help us appreciate that human reality might be smaller than we think. In the context of more-than-human thought, this can be valuable. Intuition chased by reason. There are bat facts inaccessible to a human shaped intelligence which we can still acknowledge. Indeed, it would be foolish to doubt this, given the finiteness of humanity’s expectations. After all there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them. But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted for ever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type. 9 9 Quantum mechanics is perhaps another, more rational way into this space where, for those of us grounded in scientific modes of thought, we can follow pathways into the space Nagel sets out as philosopher. One that is focused on the contradictions of seeing the world in terms of things, stuff, matter. This impossibility might even be observed by other beings, but it is not clear that the existence of such beings, or the possibility of their existence, is a precondition of the significance of the hypothesis that there are humanly inaccessible facts. (After all, the nature of beings with access to humanly inaccessible facts is presumably itself a humanly inaccessible fact.) Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.

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A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective nature of the things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by him because, although the concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenomenology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable-from the point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others. Lightning has an objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance, and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision. To be precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its visual appearance. 10 10 Exactly. More-than-human also means other-than-human imagination and conceptual apparatus. In non-human worlds based on different senses – olfactory, electrical, seismic, magnetic, auditory – things that are invisible to us, for example, might be concrete and tangible, and what is seemingly solid to another animal might be imperceptible to us. From a non-human perspective, objects that we give distinct identities to through language – teapot, steam, air – become unified in ways that fuse words into new, multi-layered object identities, beyond visual appearances.

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We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psycho-physical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. 11 11 What if we turn this on ourselves. We read that bears can smell food up to a mile away. Does this mean that we extend through their world as delicate molecular strands entering their bodies to become entangled with them? The human as a cloud of molecules rather than fleshy meat. Or sound, and even smell, for other creatures, might have a physical presence that is as solid to them as touch is to us.

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In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced. Members of radically different species may both understand the same physical events in objective terms, and this does not require that they understand the phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of members of the other species. Thus it is a condition of their referring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend. 12 12 Could embracing this unknowability encourage a deeper, more philosophical form of empathy with the other lifeforms we share this planet with, in an effort to understand their non-humanness, even if only imaginatively? The work of vocalist and sound artist Ute Wassermann beautifully problematizes this space with works such as Plankton (for voice, bird whistles, field recordings and amplified aquarium) and Strange Songs where she ‘masks her voice with bird whistles creating a hybrid vocal persona with sculptural, oscillating, swirling tone-colours.’ As one critic remarked: ‘The singer comments on and transforms the other-than-human voices and becomes part of the soundscape herself. Does her voice remain human or does it become other?’

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I should like to close with a speculative proposal. 

At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination—without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. 13 13 And maybe, it is here that we part ways with Nagel while continuing to stay in dialogue. While some philosophers seek new methods and concepts to construct an objective phenomenology of the non-human, designers can continue further down the road of attempting, through disciplined imagination, to take up the view of the experiential subject. Imagination has been mentioned many times in Nagel’s piece and it is easy to forget there are many different kinds, including philosophical, artistic and designerly. As it stands, from our perspective, the design imagination remains relatively conservative and restrained in comparison to those of other fields. And, if there is anything we would like to take away from our brief encounter with the musings of Thomas Nagel, it is that other disciplinary imaginations go far beyond what design deems permissible, often revealing that reality may not be as realistic as we think. We believe design has much to learn from fields like philosophy (and to give as well), fields that have a long history of working with ideas that stretch the imagination and allow us to see beyond the constraints of existing realities. This is essential if we are to truly engage with the more-than-human beyond welcoming them into an already too-human world.