[과제] Can we "understand" subjective experience?

On Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"

 

I do agree with Nagel that the subjective character of conscious experience is the crux of mental states, and that at first glance it does not easily admit of reduction to physical or causal-functional properties. However, despite the seeming intractability of such subjective character, I nonetheless think that we can be rather optimistic about whether we will be able to naturalize, i.e. provide a satisfactory explanation of, conscious experience and its qualitative characters, including that of a bat.

 

One philosophy-of-science-like reason for this optimism is because being able to explain what it feels like to be a bat does not necessarily require that we ourselves be capable of having the full experience of bats as well. Rather, for practically any natural phenomenon in the world, it is the case that knowing every single physical detail about the phenomenon actually hurts, rather than improves,  our understanding and ability to explain the phenomenon. The detailed movements of every single atom and molecule in a storm does not help us understand what is going on with the storm--it only confounds our view and makes us retreat to the point where we say, "oh, a storm must be an extremely complex system!"--that is the (almost null) level of understanding that a full specification of the details of a physical phenomenon usually gives us. What is rather necessary for a proper understanding of any phenomenon is that we abstract out the relevant features of a phenomenon suitable for the purpose of our inquiry. To give an analogy of this process of scientific understanding as map-making, a map the size of the actual territory that it purports to represent does not help us in any way. Only when useless details are thrown out, can we successfully make use of the map that is our theory of the world. If this claim is true, then the fact that we humans will likely never be able to undergo ourselves the experience of bats is not such a serious problem as it presents itself prima facie. Those who argue that we can never understand the subjective experience of bats because we can never have those experiences ourselves is also in the same vein as those who argue that in order for us to understand the mechanics of a storm, we must know every single physical detail about the storm. This, as I argued, is not necessarily true. In this regards, what matters for understanding a phenomenon such as the subjective experience of a bat is that we can extract out the relevant features of our experience, extrapolate them unto the experience of bats given a naturalized theoretical framework of consciousness (which must of course be developed in advance), and in turn provide a naturalized explanation for those subjective features of a bat's experience. If such a project is successfully carried out, I believe we can say we have understood what it is like to be a bat, to an extent no more or no less than our understanding of various physical phenomena.

 

Although additional methodological considerations must be made for a science of mental phenomena to properly address the subjective character of experience, I think the above reconsideration of what we would require as an appropriate scientific explanation of a phenomenon shows that our inability to live the full experience of bats does not serve as a great hindrance to our ability to scientifically explain what it feels like to be a bat.