I invoked Nagel’s ”What Is It Like to Be Bat?” in a brief blurb I recently wrote about a children’s book. Nagel’s essay came to mind because I was rereading PMS Hacker’s “IS THERE ANYTHING IT IS LIKE TO BE A BAT?,” which is shrilly capitalized in this online version. Hacker, as always, is ready with Wittgenstein for some final comments after having worked through the weird conceptual structures that attend to ideas like “what is it like to be something.”

In preparation, Hacker works his way through the transitive and intransitive concepts of consciousness (being conscious of something versus simply being awake and aware), then through how we talk about and conceive of phenomenal relationships between experiences and descriptions of the objects of those experiences. He ultimately dismisses all this “qualia” discussion in philosophy of mind:

None of this is mysterious, surprising or baffling. Nor is it the key to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness. For there are no mysteries — only empirical ignorance and conceptual mystification.

There is an interesting fissure in Hacker’s argument, I think, and it is exemplified by exactly the line of reasoning that he borrows from Wittgenstein and that dovetails with W’s notion of private language. The concern is with the objects of experience when using abstract references like “this,” “that,” and “thus”:

One would like to say ‘I see red thus,’ ‘I hear the note that you strike thus,’ ‘I feel sorrow thus,’ or even ‘This is what one feels like when one is sad, this when one is glad,’ etc. One would like to people a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises.

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