What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be a bat?
Thomas Nagel Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.1 But the problems dealt with are those common to this type of reduction and other types, and what makes the mind-body problem unique, and unlike the water-H2O problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem or the gene-DNA problem or the oak tree-hydrocarbon problem, is ignored.
Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. We may call this the subjective character of experience. I assume we all believe that bats have experience. Where Am I? By Now that I've won my suit under the Freedom of Information Act, I am at liberty to reveal for the first time a curious episode in my life that may be of interest not only to those engaged in research in the philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience but also to the general public.
Several years ago I was approached by Pentagon officials who asked me to volunteer for a highly dangerous and secret mission. In collaboration with NASA and Howard Hughes, the Department of Defense was spending billions to develop a Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device, or STUD. It was supposed to tunnel through the earth's core at great speed and deliver a specially designed atomic warhead “right up the Red's missile silos,” as one of the Pentagon brass put it.
The problem was that in an early test they had succeeded in lodging a warhead about a mile deep under Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they wanted me to retrieve it for them. “I gather the operation was a success,” I said. 1. 2. 3. Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers’ Brief by Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, and Robert Nozick. Later this year the Supreme Court will decide two cases posing the question whether dying patients have a right to choose death rather than continued pain and suffering.1 We print here the brief filed as amicus curiae in these cases by the group of six moral philosophers listed above, with an introduction by Ronald Dworkin.
> —the Editors Introduction We cannot be sure, until the Supreme Court decides the assisted suicide cases and its decision is published, how far the justices might have accepted or rejected the arguments of the brief published below.2 In this introduction I shall describe the oral argument before them last January, and offer some suggestions about how, if they decide against the brief’s position, as many commentators now think they will, they might do the least damage to constitutional law. The philosophers’ brief answers these questions in two steps. 789CaseyCruzan Ronald Dworkin—February 27, 1997 Interest of the Amici Curiae Introduction and Summary of Argument Argument.
The Analysis of mind, by Bertrand Russell.
Ancient.