Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [127]
That is the question the contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel pondered in a famous essay called, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The main thrust of Nagel’s essay doesn’t concern us here (it was about the age-old philosophical conundrum known as the mind-body problem), and you could be forgiven for wondering how any of it could possibly apply. Unless you have a thing for vampires, meditations on the nature of bats will seem irrelevant to interpersonal understanding, romantic love, and why we care about being right about other people. As it turns out, though, how Nagel thought about bats can teach us something about how we think about each other.
Nagel began by pointing out that bats are mammals, and as such almost certainly have some kind of conscious awareness, just like dogs and dolphins and you and me. So there must be some inner experience of bat-hood; it must be “like” something to be a bat, whereas it is presumably not like anything at all to be an amoeba or a sound wave or a stone. But exactly what it is like to be a bat, Nagel argued, we will never know. The difference between their kind of consciousness and ours is simply too vast. (As Nagel put it, “anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.”) Just for starters, consider the issue of perception. Bats live in the same world as we do (and sometimes in the same house), yet that world must look unimaginably different when filtered through their sensory system than through our own. We humans can try to imagine the world as rendered by sonar, just as we can try to imagine flying around in the dark, dining on insects, and spending our days sleeping upside down in the attic. As Nagel noted, however, this exercise “tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.” Alas, that is something we cannot know. The only way to know what it’s like to be a bat is to—duh—be a bat.
This problem does not begin and end with bats. For example, Nagel noted that it is equally beyond his powers to fully grasp the inner world of someone who has been deaf and blind from birth. Nor, presumably, is it possible for that person to fully imagine the inner lives of the rest of us, saturated as they are with sight and sound. This is where reasoning about one another by analogy runs up against its limits: the more different you and I are, the less we will be able to identify with each other, and the more difficult it will be to understand each other. If we can’t see ourselves in another person at all—if his beliefs and background and reactions and emotions conflict too radically with our own—we often just withdraw the assumption that he is like us in any important way. That kind of dehumanization generally leads nowhere good. As Nagel suggested in his essay, denying the reality or value of experiences just because we ourselves can’t comprehend them verges on—and certainly creates the preconditions for—cruelty.* In fact, this was the point of his essay: our failure to understand another being’s inner reality doesn’t make that reality any less real, or any less valuable to that being.
When it comes to humans and bats, this failure of comprehension is inevitable. But not so with humans and other humans, as Nagel took pains to point out. However odd your neighbor may be, however unpredictable your boss, however inscrutable your daughter’s strangely silent new boyfriend, none