What is it Like to Be a Human?
An essay by Thomas Nagle called What It Is Like to Be a Bat claims that an intractable barrier exists between the felt experiences of different organisms; that though we can imagine what it is like to be a bat, we can never really know what this experience is like because we lack the sensory apparatus—echolocation, wings, high-frequency shrieking—that makes a bat a bat. His point is to frustrate the claims of a dominant neuroscience that would reduce feelings to objective and material facts that can be collected and organized by man into what he refers to as a law; these laws make a world secure for man alone and yet he may as well be cataloging the experience of a dead man, for consciousness remains forever beyond the grasp of science: raw human experience (feelings) can never be objective nor conform to any law. From the psychoanalytic viewpoint we find a strange paradoxical movement, that while the field catalogues a universal human experience—repetition, oceanic feeling, eros, etc—it meanwhile refracts these universals by maintaining the belief that any human experience is particular to that human. If we ask: what is it like to be a human? We will receive as many answers as there are humans to give them. Yet while the feelings of another human are fundamentally strange, we must admit that even your own feelings may appear, all of a sudden, strange and uncanny…
Bats and Umbrellas, 1882, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi,
