Thomas Nagel (1974), The Philosophical Review 83(4), 435–450 — DOI-10.2307/2183914
Key takeaways
- The criterion. An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. Nagel calls this the subjective character of experience.
- What it rules out as an analysis. Functional, intentional and causal-role analyses of the mental are all logically compatible with the absence of experience. None of them can be what experience consists in. Nagel denies that these analyses exhaust experience, not that experience has causes, effects or a functional description.
- Why reduction stalls here. Elsewhere, reduction moves away from a species-specific point of view toward a more objective description of the same thing, as with lightning or sound. Experience has no appearance/reality gap for that move to close. Moving away from the point of view moves away from the phenomenon.
- The conclusion is about understanding, not falsity. Physicalism is not shown false. It is a hypothesis we cannot yet understand, as “matter is energy” would have been for a pre-Socratic.
- The proposal. Develop an “objective phenomenology”. It would describe the structural features of experience in terms usable by beings who cannot have that experience.
Standing in the record
Filed at the owner’s request on 2026-09-26. It is here as the definitional
root of the consciousness topic. LIT-056 takes phenomenal consciousness,
“something it is like”, as its sole target. This paper defines that target
and argues that the indicator method cannot settle whether it is met. Its
footnote 2 leaves the door open: anything complex enough to behave like a
person might have experiences. But that “cannot be discovered merely by
analyzing the concept”. NOTE-089 is the
reading.