Hey Vanda, thanks for the nice response. I think — on faith — my terminology here “faith” invites comparison to religion. But I’m not talking about it in the context of conventional religions, gods and what not.

I find faith in a lot of writing about consciousness, and I’m highlighting what I see as Nagel’s faith — the faith that there is something that it is like to be a bat.

I feel faith contaminates a lot of writing on consciousness. It seems consciousness is a place where a lot of atheistic types like Nagel retreat to experience their religiosity (in the same way so many of my fellow Californians talk — supposedly atheistically — about “the universe” and “energy”). Nagel is not theistic, but still taking things on faith.

You can see that faith in the way people think about the Cartesian theater. You can see this plainly in this Atlantic article — — https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/what-the-crow-knows/580726/ — a great article in general, with this funny predilection for seeing the Cartesian theater as an atomic, indivisible, ever-persistent thing.

Anyways, I see Nagel taking the existence of this “what it is like to be a bat” on faith, not theistic faith, but faith nonetheless. You seem to see my argument, you probably see my quotes of Nagel, and agree it exists. But your point, as I understand it, is that we “couldn’t depict the objective nature of the bat by taking away the bat specific point of view” is his larger point. I’m going to have to re-read Nagel a bit and think about this proposition — seems at first blush to be something related to zombie-ism, the argument that zombies can’t exist (because experience is needed for behavior), but there’s probably more to your point.

As for defining experience — I’m not trying to make my own definitions of anything in this series. I am actually doing exactly what you say — elaborating an exhaustive view of consciousness by looking at various writers, what they mean by it (see intro to this series). I do have some new writing I’m working on where I make my own definitions — but that’s a different project. Of course there are different ways to define experience. Here I focus only on Nagel’s definition used in this single, highly influential essay. I agree his definition is not really clear (and a bit self-referential) but I’m doing my best to work within his analytic framework.