A Philosophical Critique of Cognitive Psychology’s Definition of the “Person”

Abstract

Thomas Nagel s paper What is It Like to Be a Bat? is a response to re ductionist physicalist theories that attempt to reduce of the phenomena of mind to matter or a function of matter. Such theories necessarily shift their focus from the individual feeling subject to the physical object. Nagel counters that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of (437). Quite simply, a subjective feeling is not, in itself, a physical object. It is more akin to a point of view, a way of looking at things, perhaps a method of experiencing?and a method is not the same as an object. Nagel, therefore, makes a serious effort to take on a perspective other than his own. He chooses his example carefully, also considering the perspective of his readers. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders, he explains, because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all (438). Though bats are mammals, their sensory apparatus is fundamentally different from ours. If our sensory apparatus were transformed into that of a bat and we somehow managed to retain our human memories and cognitive capacities, we would still be experiencing things from the point of view of a human experiencing things from the point of view of a bat, not from the point of view of a bat as bat. We cannot have the subjective experience of what it is like to be a bat, from the point of view of a bat. This fact is apparently significant to Nagel, but how significant should it be to us? To have a first person human experience of being transformed