What is it like to be a bat? @ Impossibile, Spazio Bianco, Torino

“Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism”.

“Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless”.

Thomas Nagel, 1974