PERSON
Thomas Nagel
The philosopher who asked what it is like to be a bat—and thereby forged the only tools precise enough to ask, without fooling ourselves, whether there is anything it is like to be a machine.
In 1974 Thomas Nagel published a paper with a title that became a permanent fixture of the language: “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” It is short. The argument is deceptively simple. And its consequences have proven impossible to contain. Nagel chose the bat because it is plainly conscious and yet perceives the world through echolocation, a mode so alien to us that we cannot imagine our way into it. We can know everything about bat neurophysiology and still, he argued, have no idea what it is like to be a bat, because what it is like is accessible only from the bat’s own point of view—and that point of view is precisely what objective knowledge cannot reach. This gap between knowing all the third-person facts and knowing what it is like from the inside is the gap his whole philosophy turns on, and
large language models have made it the most urgent gap in contemporary thought. We have