There is something very beguiling about this concept of mapping, projection, identification, empathy—whatever you want to call it. It is a basic human trait, practically irresistible. Yet it can lead us down very strange conceptual pathways. The preceding puzzle shows the dangers of over facile self-projection. The refrain quoted from the country-western ballad reminds us more poignantly of the futility of taking such mapping too seriously. Yet we can’t stop our minds from doing it. So since we can’t, let’s go whole hog and indulge ourselves in an orgy of extravagant variations on the theme set by Nagel in his title.
What is it like to work at McDonald’s? To be thirty-eight? To be in London today?
What is it like to climb Mount Everest? To be an Olympic gold-medal winner in gymnastics?
What would it be like to be a good musician? To be able to improvise fugues at the keyboard? To be J. S. Bach? To be J. S. Bach writing the last movement of the Italian Concerto?
What is it like to believe the earth is flat?
What is it like to be someone inconceivably more intelligent than yourself? Inconceivably less intelligent?
What is it like to hate chocolate (or your personal favorite flavor)?
What is it like to bat a bee? What is it like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee? (Illustration by Jim Hull.)
What is it like to hear English (or one’s native language) without understanding it?
What is it like to be of the opposite sex? (See selection 15, “Beyond Rejection”)
What would it be like to be your mirror image? (See the movie Journey to the Far Side of the Sun)
What would it be like to be Chopin’s brother (he had none)? The present King of France?
What is it like to be a dreamed person? To be a dreamed person when the alarm rings? To be Holden Caulfield? To be the subsystem of J. D. Salinger’s brain that represents the character of Holden Caulfield?
What is it like to be a molecule? A collection of molecules? A microbe? A mosquito? An ant? An ant colony? A beehive? China? The United States? Detroit? General Motors? A concert audience? A basketball team? A married couple? A two-headed cow? Siamese twins? A split-brain person? One half of a split-brain person? The head of a guillotined person? The body? The visual cortex of Picasso? The pleasure center of a rat? The jerking leg of a dissected frog? A bee’s eye? A retinal cell in Picasso? A DNA molecule of Picasso?
What is it like to be a running AI program? An operating system in a computer? An operating system at the moment the system “crashes”?
What is it like to be under a general anesthetic? To be electrocuted? To be a Zen master who has attained a satori-like state in which no more subject (“I,” ego, self) exists?
What is it like to be a pebble? A wind chime? A human body? The Rock of Gibraltar? The Andromeda Galaxy? God?
What is it like to bat a bee? What is it like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee? (Illustration by Jim Hull.)
The image conjured up by the phrase “What is it like to be X”? is so seductive and tempting.... Our minds are so flexible, so willing to accept this notion, this idea that there is “something it is, like to be a bat.” Furthermore, we also willingly buy the idea that there are certain things that it is “like something to be”—“be-able things,” or “BATs” for short—such as bats, cows, people; and other things for which this doesn’t hold—such as balls, steaks, galaxies (even though a galaxy may contain innumerable be-able things). What is the criterion for “BAT-itude”?
In philosophical literature, many phrases have been used to try to evoke the right flavors for what being sentient really is (“being sentient” is one of them). Two old terms are “soul” and “anima.” These days, an “in” word is “intentionality.” There is the old standby, “consciousness.” Then there is “being a subject,” “having an inner life,” “having experience,” “having a point of view,” having “perceptual aboutness” or “personhood” or a “self” or “free will.” In some people’s eyes, “having a mind,” “being intelligent,” and just plain old “thinking” have the right flavors. In Searle’s article (selection 22), the contrast was drawn between “form” (hollow and mechanical) and “content” (alive and intentional); the words “syntactic” and “semantic” (or “meaningless” and “meaningful”) were also used to characterize this distinction. All of the terms in this huge showcase are nearly synonymous. They all have to do with the emotional issue of whether it makes sense to project ourselves onto the object in question: “Is this object a BAT, or not?” But is there really some thing to which they refer?
Nagel makes it clear that the “thing” he is after is a distillation of that which is common to the experiences of all bats; it is not the set of experiences of some particular bat. Thus, Searle might say Nagel is a “dualist,” since Nagel believes in some abstraction made from all those individuals’ experiences.
Surprisingly enough, a look at the grammar of sentences that invite the reader to perform a mental mapping yields some insights into these tricky matters. Consider, for instance, the contrast between the questions “What would it be like to be Indira Gandhi?” and “What is it like to be Indira Gandhi?” The conditional sentence forces you to project yourself into the “skin,” so to speak, of another human, whereas the indicative sentence seems to be asking what it is like for Indira Gandhi to be Indira Gandhi. The question might still be asked, “Described in whose terms?” Were Indira Gandhi to try to tell you what it is like to be Indira Gandhi, she might try to explain matters of political life in India by referring to things she considered vaguely analogous in your own experience. Would you protest and say, “No, don’t translate it into my terms! Say it in your own terms! Tell me what it is like—to Indira Gandhi—for Indira Gandhi to be Indira Gandhi!” In that case, of course, she might as well speak in Hindi and leave it to you to learn the language. And yet even then you would just be in the position of millions of native Hindi speakers who have no idea what it would be like to be Indira Gandhi—much less what it is like for Indira Gandhi to be Indira Gandhi....
Something seems very wrong here. Nagel is insistent that he wants his verb “be” to be subjectless, in effect. Not “What would it be like for me to be X”? but “What is it like, objectively, to be X?” There is a “be-ee” here, with no “be-er”—a living beast without a head, as it were. Perhaps we ought to go back to the conditional version: “What would it be like to be Indira Gandhi?” Well, for me, or for her? Poor Indira—where does she go while I’m being her? Or if we turn it around (identity being a symmetric relationship), we get “What would it be like for Indira Gandhi to be me?” Once again, where would I be if she were me? Would we have traded places? Or would we have temporarily collapsed two separate “souls” into one?
Note that we tend to say “If she were me” rather than “If she were I.” Many European languages are somewhat skittish about equations of this type. It sounds funny to use the nominative case in both the subject and complement positions. People prefer to use “be” with the accusative case, as if it were somehow a transitive verb! “Be” is not a transitive verb, but a symmetric one—yet language tilts us away from that symmetric vision.