Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon.
— Thomas Nagel, inveterate optimist
Whilst conducting primary research into the ontological foundations of metaphysical epistemology recently, O Dearly Beloved, Your Dilatory and Shockingly Remiss Correspondent happened upon a previously unpublished draft of Thomas Nagel’s seminal paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” I found upon examination of the disintegrating foolscap moldering in dank archives that this eminent philosopher had initially attempted to frame his gedankenexperiment with an empathic exercise even more challenging than imagining himself to be a member of the genus Microchiroptera. Given its patent interest for the history of analytical philosophy and its relevance to issues of concern cognate to this blogsite, I thought I would share the pertinent excerpt with you:
I assume we all believe that bankers have experience. After all, they are human beings, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that accountants or baristas or firemen have experience. I have chosen bankers instead of lawyers or politicians because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bankers, although arguably more closely related to us than those other examples, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited banker knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bankers have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a banker. Now we know that most bankers (investment bankers, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by money sense, or moolah-location, detecting the reflections, from monetary instruments or securities within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent jingling or rustling of exchangeable claims to value, and the information thus acquired enables bankers to make precise discriminations of denomination, fungibility, composition, and theft-prevention protections comparable to those we make by vision. But banker money sense, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a banker. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the banker from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
Fortunately for the history of analytic philosophy, Professor Nagel apparently abandoned this initial foray as unworkable and, frankly, too outrageous and incomprehensible for anyone but specialists in the study of Homo investmentbankerensis. His revised paper, reframed to less ambitious dimensions, seems to have gone on to some renown, notwithstanding his execrable timidity.
Fortunately for you and everyone like you, I am led to believe there is a minor blogsite located somewhere in cyberspace which tackles these recondite issues head on. Perhaps you can drop me a postcard if you find it.
By the way, is that a $20 bill in your pocket?
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