PERSON
Thomas Nagel
The philosopher who placed a single question at the center of contemporary thought—“What is it like to be a bat?”—and demonstrated that the subjective character of experience resists every method we have for understanding the world from the outside.
In 1974, Thomas Nagel published a fourteen-page essay that became the most cited work in the philosophy of mind of the following half-century. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” did not introduce a new theory of
consciousness. It did something more radical: it demonstrated that every existing theory had failed to account for the one feature of consciousness that makes it consciousness—the fact that there is something it is like, from the inside, to have an experience. The technical term is
qualia: the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the qualitative character of what it is like to taste coffee. No physical description of the neural process, however complete, will contain the taste. The description operates in third-person terms; the taste is constitutively first-personal. Remove the point of view, and the quality disappears. Nagel placed this rock in the philosophical landscape five decades ago. The arrival of
large language models that produce