Get ready to laugh.

Ready? OK. Here goes.

A number of years ago the philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed a question in an essay titled eponymously with the question itself — What is it like to be a bat? In this essay Nagel analyzes certain reductionist theories of mind while exploring the various ways in which it can be said that we can in some sense “know” what it is like to be someone or something other than ourselves.

This question—What is it like to be a bat?—and the eponymous essay in which it was first proposed have been touchstones ever since for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, the mind/body problem, and the meaning, reality, or nature of consciousness and subjectivity.

The entire, fascinating subject can be handled less philosophically, more personally, colloquial-like. Imagine we are sharing a leisurely Sunday morning brunch at your favorite restaurant. I bring up Nagel’s essay in a light-hearted way and note the following:

• Changing just one letter, I ask: What is it like to be a Bob?
• Changing two words, I ask: What is it like be you?
• Changing even more words: What is it like to be something that can ask such questions?
• And so on.

The form of the question is simple; its contents, infinite.

If we ever meet, and you happen to ask me what it was like to laugh out loud (really hard and long) after writing the above, I would begin my answer by recounting an episode in the editor’s introduction to an anthology of  essays by the humorist S. J. Perelman. The editor excuses himself mid-introduction, just after rhetorically posing the question: What is humor? Upon returning to finish writing the introduction, the editor informs us that beginning to think of an answer sent him into a laughing fit so severe that he had to lie down on a couch with a cold wash cloth draping his forehead.

The editor never does answer the question, instead he cleverly suggests that the Perelman essays to follow will present an answer to the question of what humor is — what makes something funny — much better than any answer he might attempt in the expository prose of his introduction.

One final question. If you ask: What is it like to be us? I would answer laughter (don’t laugh now, wait a sec, keep reading), I would answer that laughter defines us right now, at this very moment.  But only if you laugh, right now.

LOL

I have just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. With thinkers like Hofstadter making clear what it is to be alive and human, I believe we need less and less to resist the apparent truth that consciousness is constituted of forces, things, and processes wholly physical in nature. (I say physical instead of material because the physical includes energy fields and virtual particles of the quantum realm, entities not usual referred to as material.) I can do no better right now to convey some of Hofstadter’s thoughts on the subject than to share a couple of quotes from the final few pages of the book’s “Epilogue.”

Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation — categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems — vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (Hofstadter, 363-364)

I’m following Strange Loop with David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness. From the intro it seems that, in addition to his original thoughts and insights on the case for consciousness being wholly physical, I will also be treated to an overview of the major positions, terminology, and arguments comprising philosophy of mind.