Ben Underwood & Thomas Nagel

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Okay, its impossible to have the same experiental background as a bat, so in some respects nobody can know exactly what it is to be like a bat. But, under the same reasoning, nobody can no exactly what it is to be another person and bats don't exactly know what it is to be like other bats.

"Irreductionist" philosopher Thomas Nagel has used the intuition pump of no person being capable of replicating the inner life of a bat as a weapon against physicalist attempts to reduce mental phenomena to neural phenomena. He first started using this in a paper entitled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. Nagel seems to have been using this idea as a kind of way to show how counterintuitive reductive physicalism is.

That, of course, was well before Ben Underwood.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLziFMF4DHA[/youtube]

But could Ben Underwood, in a vague sort of way, know what it is to be like a bat? Unfortunately, Ben Underwood died at age 16 on January 19, 2009, so we can't ask him his thoughts on the matter. And, more importantly, does the human echolocation Ben Underwood used have any implication at all for Nagel's argument? Is Nagel's argument as powerful when rephrased that "really, none of us now exactly what is to be like any given other human or any bat because of a different background of experiental associations."?

Nagel is right.

Perhaps his premises are correct, but is his conclusion that reductive physicalism is false correct as well?

Dunno. Isn't the quantum state in flux until it is measured?

I don't quite see where you're going with this. Could you elaborate?

I should note again, that rather tragically, Ben Underwood died of a recurrence of cancer. It would've been interesting to see how he developed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhtMXpNW1zc[/youtube]

What role does observation play in the final determination? Does it determine a result on a micro level? If so, it could be possible that one's self may determine a result to some minutia? If so, then you'd see Nagel being right in regards to reductive physicalism. What determines one winning the lottery? It's odds, yes...but considering that numbers are at random and numbers are picked at random...what is random?

Bats are very different and thus have different processes and inputs. We don't even know what it is like to be ourselves.

The notion that measurement affects the that which is being measured on a quantumly small scale is not at all surprising. On a macroscopic scale, can bring in a camera and photograph a room without notably altering the room because the camera's effects (interacting with a few air or dust molecules) is neglible. At a quantum scale, this couldn't happen. the Measuring device itself interferes with the phenomena.

No need for dualism or panpsychism or any other quantum spookery here. Good ol' fashion reductive physicalism prevails.