The ultimate mystery in philosophy & metaphysics
Going beyond Nagel and his ‘like a bat’: an exercise in primordial ontology, involving both conceptual clarification and observational drilling down
19 min readFeb 15, 2024
Introduction Nagel and his ‘what it’s like to be a bat’
An ontology of subjectivity
Is ‘what it’s like to be me’ a crucial marker of interiority?
The ontological ground of perceptibility itself: the ‘apprehending
capacity’
Markers of subjectivity and interiority
The ontological interchangeability of perceptual markers
Interiority and the ‘ultimate metaphysical mystery’: existence itself called into question
Summary and Conclusion
Bibliography
Nagel’s ‘like a bat’ is ‘the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.’ Daniel Dennett (1991)
Introduction
Philosophy and metaphysics are both notoriously uninformative when it comes to a plain and simple ontology of ‘consciousness’, and anyone studying the literature will…