Thomas Nagel’s “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” (Philosophical Review, 1974, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, pp. 165-180) is a contemporary classic in the philosophy of mind, and its signature ‘what is it like’ locution has become a stock phrase rather loosely bandied about in discussions of subjectivity and consciousness. The phrase can be interpreted in several ways. Clarity will be served if we distinguish them.
1. To ask what something is like might simply be to inquire into its properties. What is the new dean like? He is bright, widely published, but a bit pompous. What is your house like? It is spacious, two-story, and well-situated. In this case, what a thing is like is what its properties are. Since everything has properties, there is something that everything is like. Clearly, this sense of ‘like’ has nothing to do with what Nagel means when he writes, "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism." (106) In this sense, there is nothing it is like to be a rock or a spark plug or a house.
2. To ask what something is like might be to inquire into what it is similar to. Is the new dean like the old one? In some ways yes, in others no. Here, what a thing is like is what it is similar to or comparable with. Everything is similar to something else in some respect. This sense of ‘like’ also has nothing to do with Nagel’s question.
3. Consider a heavy, moss-covered stone. There is something it is like, namely, heavy and moss-covered. The experience of the stone is also like something in that it too has properties. But the bearer of Nagel's what-it-is-like feature is not the experience taken by itself but the subject of the experience, the subject as having the conscious experience. It is the subject of the experience, or the organism that has the experience, that has a point of view. An experience does not have a point of view. I have a point of view, and so there is something it like to be me.
4. The 'what it is like' locution is perhaps unfortunate due to its ambiguity. Nagel's point can be made without it. A rock is en soi but not pour soi, in itself but not for itself. Nagel himself invokes this Sartrean terminology. (168) A man lifting a rock and experiencing its heaviness is pour soi. The felt experience, the phenomenal qualitative feel, of heaviness exists only for the subject. It has a subjective, point-of-viewish mode of existence.
5. From this one can see the absurdity of denying qualia. To deny qualia is to deny one's being-for-oneself, one's subjectivity, one's first-personality if you will. To deny qualia is to deny that one is conscious in the way we actually experience consciousness, namely from the first-person point of view. For qualia are just the myriad ways in which one's consciousness is articulated and appears to itself. For example, right now I am intellectually excited, enjoying the golden tones of the setting sun as it plays upon Superstition Mountain, feeling the cool breeze of an overhead fan . . . and that does not even begin to describe the rich content of my current experience.
Qualia need no argument, they stand fast on their own as phenomenological data. That they resist reduction to items in a third-person ontology is no argument against them; it is rather an argument for the incompleteness of third-person ontology.