Last episode I posted a link to Thomas Nagel’s— What is it like to be a bat? — and it’s an example of one of many arguments in response the physicalist approach to the mind. 

Bats are able to capture their prey in the dark by the use of something called echolocation sonar, or bio-sonar. By using a call-and-echo response, bats are just one of many creatures who are able to who can identify food (in their case, flying creatures). This led Nagel to argue that bats have some form of conscious awareness, but but we are unable to understand what the inner experience of the bat. While we can analyse the hunting patterns of a bat, even dissect the creature and many like it, we cannot have a true insight into what it is like to be that creature. 

It’s this that leads Nagel to claim that theories of mind that consider consciousness to be merely neurological events and chemical responses to be missing the qualitative element of consciousness — the way things seem and feel, a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. 

The subjective character of experience is known as qualia — and since this is philosophy, there’s further debates on whether that is a good enough argument for what consciousness involves as well!