A 50th anniversary edition of one of the most widely influential articles of 20th Century philosophy ?Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.? So begins Thomas Nagel's classic 1974 essay ?What is it Like to be a Bat?? Nagel's essay initiated the now widespread attention to consciousness as a central problem for philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience; it also influenced the recognition of the consciousness of nonhuman creatures as an important subject of study. Nagel argued that the essential subjectivity of conscious experience -- what it is like for the creature undergoing it -- means that reductionist theories of mind, which attempt to analyze it in physical terms, can never succeed. It follows that the physical sciences cannot provide a complete description of reality, and that the physical conception of objective reality must be transcended if science is...
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