As conscious human beings we have an astonishing amount of experiences every day and

we tend to describe these experiences by how it feels to have them. Yet what does it mean to feel

or know what it is like to have an experience, and how do these feelings relate to human

perception and consciousness? These questions are addressed by Thomas Nagel in his essay

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” where he promotes the existence of a subjective character of

experience, an idea that is represented by most philosophers with the concept of “qualia”. I

argue, along with Bennett and Hacker, that Nagel’s argument for qualia is inventive yet

ultimately unconvincing and that the existence of qualia has yet to be established. First I give a

cursory review of Nagel’s essay and his central argument. Then I discuss Bennett and Hacker’s

response to the essay and the conception of qualia. Finally, after evaluating both respective

works, I examine whether qualia exists or not.

1. Knowing What It Is Like

Nagel’s influential and highly cited thought experiment asks the reader to try and imagine

what it would be like to be a bat. But why is Nagel asking this of us and what are the

implications of this question? It should be noted that the decision to use a bat for this exercise

was not arbitrarily made by Nagel; it is an animal that is differentiated enough from a human by

its foreign ability of perceiving via echolocation and other alien forms of behavior, and at the

same time it is familiar enough as a mammal that it enables one to assume that a bat is capable of

having experiences. The latter part of this reasoning is especially important for Nagel since he is

ultimately investigating how phenomenal experience can fit into a physicalist account of

consciousness. The phenomenological features of experience can be understood by turning to the

wording used in Nagel’s original question of “what is it like to be a bat?” To say that a creature

has a “conscious experience” is to say that “there is something it is like to be that organism”
(Nagel 2). Thus if a bat does have experiences then there is something it is like to be a bat, or the

“subjective character of experience” (Nagel 2). Embedded within Nagel’s explanations are

premises that his argument will be constructed upon. First is that (1) an experience is a conscious

experience only if there is something it is like for the subject to have this experience. Secondly,

(2) a creature can have conscious experiences only if there something which it is like to be that

creature. Returning to Nagel’s question with these premises in mind will be useful in unearthing

his central argument concerning consciousness.

When attempting to explain what it is like to be a bat, we would first turn to our

imagination and try to picture what it would be like to be able to fly or have sonar and so on.

However this would just be someone imagining what it would be like for them to be a bat, not

what it is like for a bat to be a bat. We thus cannot extrapolate the desired knowledge of a bat’s

experience through these means. Nevertheless we can try to observe the physical structure of the

animal and its behavior, allowing us to express what we believe it is like to be a bat, like I have

reason to believe that bats sometimes experience fear and hunger. Yet this method falls short

since all the experiences we would believe that bats have based on our observations “also have in

each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive” (Nagel 3).

Consequently, the inability to know the subjective character of a bat’s experience illuminates that

“there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language”

(Nagel 4). This holds true for anyone of a different “type” than the subject of the experience,

since it would be impossible for me to know the experiences of a blind and deaf person and vice

versa. The facts of experience are only accessible subjectively; each experience has a qualitative

feel to it. Recalling premises (1) and (2), and recognizing that physicalism requires that all

mental events have physical descriptions, then the existence of this indescribable qualitative feel
of experience, commonly referred to as “qualia”, has given consciousness a subjective character

immune from physical description (Nagel 7). If a creature with consciousness must have

conscious experiences, and these experiences necessarily require that there is something which it

is like for the subject to have them, then consciousness is thus characterized by the mark of

qualia.

2. The Problem of Knowing What It Is Like

So far consciousness has been defined by the way it feels to have an experience, the

qualitative character of each experience. However there is reason to believe that this explanation

of consciousness and the notion that one can know what it is like to be another creature are put

forward with unstable logical footing. Bennett and Hacker argue that not every experience has a

certain feel to it, and that the notion of qualia is confusingly stretching the scope of

consciousness. Experiences, and by extension qualia, are being understood to “include not only

perception, sensation, and affection, but also desire, thought and belief” (Bennett and Hacker

273). These “experiences” are individuated by their objects and may or may not be subject of an

attitudinal predicate. Listening to Bach and listening to Rachmaninoff are different experiences,

yet when asked how each experience felt they could both be answered with the same description

of “inspiring”. Additionally when walking down the street and I see numerous objects like trees

and mailboxes but these different experiences may not have a distinct qualitative feel to them,

since there may not be a feeling at all. Qualia are merely describing the object of experience, not

the experience itself. It is a logical muddle to say that each experience has a special feel to it.

If X is the subject of an experience and V is a verb specifying experience, then stating

that “There is something it is like for X to V” does nothing in expressing the qualitative character
of the experience. For unless this statement is making a comparison to another experience, which

for proponents of qualia like Nagel it is not, then it is incoherently trying to say that “For X to V

is like A” when A is the affective attitude of the subject. This is like saying “For me to listen to

Bach is like inspiring”, an unintelligible sentence born from the misguided effort of

characterizing conscious experience in terms of qualia (Bennett and Hacker 277). Moreover

Nagel’s original question is met with similar logical impediment that discredits much of thought

experiment.

To ask “What it is like to be a bat?” is essentially asking what it is like for a bat to be a

bat, or “What it is like for an X to be an X?”. The reiteration of the subject makes this question

considerably less meaningful than it would be if it asked “What is it like for a Y to be an X?”, as

the subject in the former statement does not differ from its object and does not allow for the

contrasts that can be made in the latter. The question “What it is like for a professor to be a

professor?” is much different, and much less revealing than, “What is it like for a professor to be

a soldier?” Furthermore if X is a creature, like a bat or a human being, then this question makes

even less sense. Assuming that stories like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis are indeed fiction,

human beings cannot change into other creatures, and nothing other than a human being can be a

human being. Since there is no alternative possibility of what else a sentient creature could be,

the question of “What is it like for an X to be an X?” should be understood as “What is it like to

be an X?” However as the above arguments have shown, this question would avoid the most

logical complications if it is interpreted as “an inquiry into the attitudinal features” of the life of

X, a request that can be feasibly answered by one who is familiar enough with X (Bennett and

Hacker 280). There is no unique way that it feels for a person to have an experience, and it is

mistaken to claim that every conscious experience has qualia.

3. Do Qualia Exist?

Determining the existence of qualia is contingent upon what is meant by the term. If

qualia are to be understood in the terms that Nagel portrayed them in, then it seems unlikely that

qualia exist. Bennett and Hacker have exposed Nagel’s claim that one cannot know what it is

like to be a bat or even a dissimilar human being to be a point that sheds no real light on the

nature of consciousness and I conclude that there is little reason to believe that this statement is

actually true in the first place. Why shouldn’t one be able to accurately describe the life of a bat

without having to transform his mind to that of a bat? It appears reasonable to suggest that

imagining what it is like to be a bat can be successfully done by third person observation of the

behavior of the animal in conjunction with an understanding of the bat’s perceptual and

behavioral structure. Through enough research and experimentation a vivid depiction of a bat’s

life can be constructed; a picture that eventually can be considered complete unless qualia is

proven to exist. Fortunately the presumption that there is something it is like to have a conscious

experience has been undercut by the logical problems that come with expressing attitudinal

predicates when using this phrasing, along with the realization that qualia must be describing the

objects of experience, not the experience itself. Nonetheless, at this point it is possible that a

defender of qualia would object that I am misconstruing what is really meant by qualia, that each

experience has a unique qualitative character that makes it distinct from any other experience and

this is what cannot be observed.

I am not denying that listening to Bach is a different experience than listening to

Rachmaninoff, or that tasting a strawberry is a different experience from seeing the color red.

However I am putting forward that when one is asked what the distinct qualitative character is of

a certain experience, like seeing red, they will fail to give a meaningful answer. They can say “In
my mind I see red like this”, but this is without meaning unless said while pointing to what

Wittgenstein called “a picture of what is experienced” (Bennett and Hacker 282). When a girl

wants her hair dyed in a particular color, she does not just show up with the color in mind and

says dye my hair “this color”, but she brings a picture or sample of that specific color and then

can say “this color”. She is not pointing to any quale or any other subjective character to define

the concept of red, since seeing that picture is the experience of seeing red, an experience that

can be shared by others with normal color vision. The defender of qualia may say that this

inability to express one’s own mental image is indicative of the subjective and private nature of

qualia. But it has already been shown that qualia are concerned with the properties of objects of

experiences, and the experiences themselves are not objects that can be privately owned. Two

people can enjoy or disdain the same experience despite the alleged unique and distinct nature of

qualia.

While the constraints of this paper have made it impossible to fully evaluate all the

arguments for and against the existence of qualia, progress has been made in establishing what

qualia are not. First qualia, and the idea that experiences have a certain feeling, are not what

define consciousness. Secondly, qualia are not characterized by knowing something it is like to

have an experience. Finally, qualia are not unique and distinct qualitative characters of

experience. While an intriguing thought experiment, the existence of qualia is not established by

Nagel’s argument