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Digital Audiobook
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel

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What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Narrator
Joe Barrett
Publisher
Highbridge Company
Publish Date
19 November 2024
Run Time
1 hour 5 minutes
Format
Audiobook
$13.95

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What to expect

"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable." So begins Thomas Nagel's classic 1974 essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Nagel's essay initiated the now widespread attention to consciousness as a central problem for philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; it also influenced the recognition of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures as an important subject of study. Nagel argued that the essential subjectivity of conscious experience—what it is like for the creature undergoing it—means that reductionist theories of mind, which attempt to analyze it in physical terms, can never succeed. It follows that the physical sciences cannot provide a complete description of reality, and that the physical conception of objective reality must be transcended if science is going to comprehend the mind.



This edition reissues this classic and widely influential article on its fiftieth anniversary, along with a new preface discussing the origins and influence of the essay, as well as "Further Thoughts: The Psychophysical Nexus," a supplementary essay which describes Nagel's later thoughts about how to respond to the problem posed by "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

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Details

Author
Thomas Nagel
Narrator
Joe Barrett
Duration
1 hour 5 minutes
Release Date
19 November 2024
ISBN
9781696618038
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Highbridge Company
Genre
Philosophy of mind

Synopsis

"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable." So begins Thomas Nagel's classic 1974 essay "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Nagel's essay initiated the now widespread attention to consciousness as a central problem for philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; it also influenced the recognition of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures as an important subject of study. Nagel argued that the essential subjectivity of conscious experience—what it is like for the creature undergoing it—means that reductionist theories of mind, which attempt to analyze it in physical terms, can never succeed. It follows that the physical sciences cannot provide a complete description of reality, and that the physical conception of objective reality must be transcended if science is going to comprehend the mind.This edition reissues this classic and widely influential article on its fiftieth anniversary, along with a new preface discussing the origins and influence of the essay, as well as "Further Thoughts: The Psychophysical Nexus," a supplementary essay which describes Nagel's later thoughts about how to respond to the problem posed by "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"

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