Thomas Nagel Bat Analysis

Thomas Nagel brought up the big question. Can we know what it is like to be a bat? Nagel’s question is asking can we truly know what it is like to someone or something else rather than ourselves. Is our mind limited by our experiences that we have had personally? Not everyone shares the same experiences as everybody else. If a group of people were to witness a tragedy. Every single one of them might all show the same emotion, but not everyone would handle that emotion the same as everyone else around them. Someone in that group could get PTSD from the event. Another person could just need therapy, and others could just see it and not affect them dramatically. These people would remember everything but just keep as a bad memory. While the rest, …show more content…
Just because we study them and understand their habits that does not mean we know what it is like to be them. The problem with not knowing how it is really like to be a bat is that we are not bats. We are human beings and human beings are confined within our own minds. Our imaginations are limited through our own experiences. We can imagine being a bat but we cannot really see through their eyes because we never experienced what it is like to be a bat. We could only imagine performing the actions of a bat while imagining that we are in a bats body. The only issue with that is that we never actually experienced that. As human beings we cannot fly freely. Our form of flying is through a plane. Also bats are way smaller than a human. No one can look through their eyes without being their height. Size matters when it comes to looking at the world at a different perspective, because of that our imaginations are restricted from our own experiences. No matter how hard we observe a bat we cannot be a bat. The only thing we learn from observing a bat is their behavior. We can watch them eat, sleep, and do their normal routine as a bat, but in the end that will not answer the question of to know what it is like to be a bat. Thomas Nagel’s argument of we cannot know what it is like to be a bat is completely true. Human beings will truly never know what it is like to be a bat. Even if in the …show more content…
I also believe our imaginations are limited due to our experiences. Everyone experiences different things through their life. Some people might break a bone others might not. Those people who do have an experience and feel that others do not have. The only way other people could experience that feel is to break a bone. Even if so that would not be enough to experience what they felt. No one can truly know what it is like to be another person or species unless they were that person. We are who we are by birth we might not have our personality and memories that define us yet. In those moments the only thing that starts to shape who we are. Are the people who raise us. Our parents start to shape who we are going to be for most of our lives. Our parents are our parents they are no one else’s but ours. They are the people who teach us right from wrong, and they are the ones that help us in progressing through our first years. Since they are only ours that means no one else has the experience of being with them at that critical stage. They help us to separate us from the rest of the world. They help us to form our experiences, memory, and skills. Those few things define who we are. We would not be able to be who we are without those qualities. No one can be anyone else no matter how great their imagination is because other people do not have the same experiences as others. Other