What It’s Like to Be a Bat: The Limits of Human Understanding

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a bat. Not a metaphorical night owl or a creature of the shadows in some poetic sense—an actual, flesh-and-fur bat, navigating the world through echolocation. You don’t see as humans do; instead, you emit high-frequency sounds and interpret the echoes to form an understanding of your surroundings. The walls, the air currents, the flutter of an insect’s wings—these are not visual images in your mind but an entirely different kind of perception. Now, here’s the question: What does it feel like to experience the world this way?

This is the thought experiment posed by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? His argument isn’t about bats per se, but rather about the nature of consciousness and the difficulty (or impossibility) of fully understanding the subjective experience of another being.

The Core of Nagel’s Argument: The Subjective Nature of Consciousness

Nagel’s essay challenges the way we think about the mind, arguing that consciousness is fundamentally subjective—meaning that it can only be fully understood from the inside, from the perspective of the being that possesses it. While we might study a bat’s brain, track its behavior, and even simulate echolocation with technology, none of this brings us closer to knowing what it actually feels like to be a bat.

Nagel argues that there is something it is like to be a conscious being. Humans, for example, experience the world through sight, sound, touch, and thought. Bats, on the other hand, rely heavily on sonar-like perception. The bat’s experience is completely alien to us, and no amount of scientific analysis can fully bridge that gap. In other words, understanding the mechanics of echolocation does not equal experiencing echolocation.

Why This Matters: The Limits of Objective Science

Nagel’s argument poses a significant challenge to physicalism—the idea that everything about the mind can be explained in purely physical, objective terms. If consciousness is wholly reducible to brain states and neural activity, then in theory, we should be able to understand any conscious experience by studying its physical processes. But Nagel suggests that something is missing: the subjective, first-person experience of being a conscious entity.

This creates a major philosophical dilemma. Science is built on objective, third-person observation—it explains how brains work, how senses function, and how behavior emerges. But can it ever truly explain what it feels like to experience the world from another perspective? If not, does that mean there are aspects of consciousness that are beyond scientific understanding?

The “Bat Problem” and the Question of Artificial Consciousness

Nagel’s bat experiment also raises questions about artificial intelligence and machine consciousness. If we ever build an AI that claims to be conscious, how would we know if it really experiences anything? A sophisticated AI might process information, recognize patterns, and even simulate human emotions—but would it actually feel anything? Or would it just be mimicking the behaviors associated with conscious experience?

The bat problem suggests that we might never be able to answer this question definitively because we can only judge consciousness from the outside. Just as we can’t truly know what it’s like to be a bat, we might never know what it’s like (if anything) to be an AI.

Bringing It Back to Us: Can We Ever Understand Each Other?

Nagel’s argument doesn’t just apply to bats or AI—it has profound implications for human relationships and empathy. Even among our own species, no two people experience reality in exactly the same way. We might use words like “love,” “pain,” or “fear,” but do we ever truly know if others feel these emotions the same way we do?

This doesn’t mean empathy is impossible—far from it. But it does suggest that every conscious experience contains an element of uniqueness that can never be fully translated into words or understood from the outside. The question of “what it’s like to be you” is, at some level, as mysterious as “what it’s like to be a bat.”

Conclusion: Embracing the Mystery of Consciousness

Nagel’s bat question reminds us that consciousness is not just a puzzle of neurons and computations—it is something deeply personal, subjective, and, to some extent, unknowable. While science can explain the workings of the brain, it may never fully capture what it feels like to experience the world through another’s mind. Whether this means consciousness is something beyond the physical or simply that we haven’t yet found the right tools to study it is still up for debate.

So, can we ever know what it’s like to be a bat? Probably not. But maybe that’s okay. After all, understanding that some mysteries exist might be part of what makes consciousness so fascinating in the first place.