On Looking at Consciousness

October 19, 2022 timothywstanley@me.com

To the man with a scanner, everything looks like a brain. But of course, there are other tools for exploring what consciousness might be — not just what it is for, but what it is like... But what of Thomas Nagel, whose classic essay 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' set the parameters of House’s search? It’s true that a number of neuroscientists and their readers have contested Nagel’s claim that there is something it is like to be a bat, and that this subjective dimension of consciousness is inaccessible to objective study. One can imagine why practitioners dedicated to just such studies might object to such prima facie limits. But House adopts Nagel’s perspective, albeit without naming him. 'The one and only thing we know for certain for every one of us,' House writes early on, is that 'there is something that it is like to be us.' And for both men, that 'something' remains just beyond the grasp of anyone but the person experiencing it. Subjective knowledge of me never evolves into objective knowledge of you. Try as we might, 'we can only ever scratch the surface of what really goes on inside' others. While this view leads Nagel to pessimism, House holds out hope that if we just keep scratching, we’ll bridge the divide and explain what it is like to be a bat — or any other conscious being.

Henry M. Cowles, “What Is It Like to Have a Brain? On Patrick House’s ‘Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness,’” https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-is-it-like-to-have-a-brain-on-patrick-houses-nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-consciousness/. The need to bring together first person phenomenological analysis of consciousness with third person neuroscientific scanning the brain remains a vital future task it seems.