Thomas Nagel asks what it is like to be a bat, challenging us to imagine an experience radically unlike our own.
But before we ask that question, I wonder about the baseline we are starting from.
Is it human?
Is it narrower than that?
Is it assumed to be a man?
And do I, as a so-called man, even know what it is like to be one?
I suspect I have more in common with women than I have differences from them, and more in common with any body at all than with the analytic boxes we are placed into.
Experience does not arrive subdivided.
It arrives as breath in the chest.
As weight in the body.
As hunger, fatigue, warmth.
As the brief flare of attention when something matters.
It does not appear as male or female, white or straight.
It does not announce itself with labels.
It simply happens.
Only later do we name it.
Only later do we sort it.
Only later do we lay grids over it and call the grids reality.
So what does it mean to be subdivided analytically, endlessly, into white, straight, male, and so on?
Is that something it is like to be at all?
A body does not feel like a category.
A mind does not wake up as an abstraction.
Breath has no taxonomy.
Attention does not check boxes before it moves.
When lived experience resists subdivision, it is not confused.
It is exact.
And if experience is grounded in sensation rather than category, then Nagel’s question changes shape.
I may not know what it is like to be a bat in its particulars. I cannot hear with echo or map space through sound. But I do know what it is like to have a world at all.
To be oriented.
To be drawn toward what matters.
To perceive selectively, partially, and sufficiently.
In that sense, experience is shared.
Not in content.
In structure.
What I share with the bat is not its world.
What I share is world-having itself.
The bat is not unknowable.
The category is.