Qualia Forum

In his famous article ‘What is it like to be a bat’ ? (1974), Thomas Nagel proposes to show that it exists a characteristic, unscrutinizable and not accessable objectively element in the subjective experience, which determines the point of view of the experience itself. Among recent philosophical theories of mind, this element has eventually been identified as qualia, i.e, as intrinsic properties of the conscious mental activity (or ‘what is to have’ a certain qualitative and phenomenal sense in the experience). On Nagel´s proposal, this characteristic element establishes the outlines of distinction between objective and subjective phenomena. In a certain way, this distinction seems close to what the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1934) understands to be the distinction between Umwelt e Innenwelt and it has motivated many studies in cognitive ethology (Allen e Bekoff, 1997). Particularly, by oposition to Innenwelt, ou ‘inner world’, the term Umwelt, or ‘self-world’, describes the structure of the subjective experience of different organisms from lower scales (jelly-fisch) to higher scales (human being). Starting from an approach taken on cognitive ethology, I intend to show that the notion of ‘self-world’ can objectively describe on the animal organization what Nagel (and followers) considers to be a subjective and unscrutinizable characteristic among different points of view of the experience itself. At the same time, it´s very curious, this conception of ‘self-world’ seems to to be similar to the extensive idea of ‘experience’ which includes non-human organisms as it has been proposed by Nagel (The view from nowhere). So ‘qualia’ is not a particular property of human consciousness, but it can be understood as or attributed to different experiences in the natural/biological world. In this sense, this extensive idea of experience by Nagel can make us see ‘qualia’ as subjective or point of view of certan experiences in the world. So I´m trying to face up to this question: How are the subjective experiences distributed in the world ? Is the subjectivity a natural property ? This question is correlated to the Problem of Distribuition in the recent cognitive ethology (Griffin, 1976; 1992). In fact, Griffin recognizes the influence of Nagel´s conception of experience and von Uexkull´s conception of ‘self-world’ on his approaching of animal minds.


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