Running head: REFLECTION PAPER PSYC. 101.

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Norton Psychology Reflection Paper Assignment 2

Trae Wilson
North Carolina A&T State University
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In today’s age of societal thinking, the mind is a set of cognitive features which enables

an individual’s memory, thinking, consciousness, perception, and judgement. Moreover, without

our minds or conscious experiences, an individual would not be able to understand what makes

them who they are. Correspondingly, in Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,”

Nagel asserts that even though there is an understanding of what it is like to be an organism,

humans are not fully capable of knowing what it is like to be a bat. Furthermore, Nagel backs his

claims through the importance of an organism’s conscious experiences, knowledge and

memories which allow an individual to identify themselves.

Generally, to distinguish what it is like to be another creature, it is essential to know the

conscious experiences and capabilities of another and to have the same viewpoints. Hence, the

notion of a human experiencing what it is like being a bat: Nagel claims that it is impossible. For

example: If a sightless man or a non-handicapped person tried to understand what it is like for

them to be one another, it is impossible. The main reason being that both men distinguish and

comprehend their sense of vision differently; one has the ability to use their sense of vision,

while the other does not. Thus, connecting back to Nagel’s dispute, without one’s conscious

experiences being the same as another’s, an individual simply cannot honestly know what it is

like to be another organism, only themselves.

When Hoffman discusses vision by construction, the same claim can be made to other

senses. All senses have synapses and neurons that are engaged upon use just as our eyes do.

There are just as many intricacies with hearing that make it as analogous as vision, and just as
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important! The hearing constructions humans encounter on a daily basis draw the same

computations and reactions from the ears. Ordinarily, individuals rely on being able to translate

the world around them into accurate sense perceptions (in this instance hearing perception). Yet,

in certain circumstances, the relationship between stimuli and senses breaks down, leading to

some interesting results. All of this could be broken down in the exact same way in which

humans perceive things by using their eyes, albeit with more or less similarities and differences.
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Works Cited

Nagel, T. (2004, April 20). What is it like to be a bat? Retrieved from

https://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf