What is it like to be this bat?
I. Introduction
We have long grappled with understanding what it truly means to inhabit another being’s perspective, a question epitomized by Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” Nagel’s answer suggests that a bat’s conscious experience, signified by “what-is-it-likeness,” or qualia, remains inaccessible to humans. His view treats a bat’s experience as a generic, species-wide phenomenon—what philosophers call “creature consciousness.” However, when we examine how consciousness actually manifests, we find it emerges only through particular states of environmental engagement. By focusing exclusively on physical traits like echolocation while ignoring the ecological interactions and embodied engagements that give these traits meaning, Nagel reduces bat consciousness to interiority, disconnected from the very contexts that make conscious experience possible.
This paper challenges two interconnected assumptions in Nagel’s argument: (1) a bat’s conscious experience is largely internal and can be understood in isolation, and (2) a bat’s “what-is-it-likeness” is characterized solely by its “batness”—unchanging and fundamentally different from “humanness.” Drawing on the philosophies of Deleuze, Heidegger, and Gilbert Simondon, as well as insights from enactive cognition, this paper redefines “what-is-it-likeness” as a dynamic, emergent phenomenon. Under this redefined conception of “what-is-it-likeness,” qualia arise from singular events and relational processes, which are best understood through the concept of “haecceity”—an irreducible “thisness” shaped by ongoing interactions within relational fields—rather than being tied to a static, self-contained “batness.”
II. A bat-in-the-world
Nagel’s essay (1974) treats the bat’s physical body as the primary basis for its experience, neglecting the crucial role of environment: “Now we know that most bats (the Microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks… For example, we may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal’s structure and behavior” (438–439). His conceptualization ignores the other side of conscious experience—the surroundings that are being experienced by the subject. Paradoxically, a bat’s physiology itself necessitates environmental interaction—echolocation requires external objects to reflect sound. Can we really, as Bergson (1990) puts it, “wave a magician’s wand separating the two when obviously they sit within a single closed system of material causes and effects?” (39) Can the bat’s “what-is-it-likeness” have any meaningful content when it excludes the environment with which the bat interacts? A bat in a vat?
Heidegger’s ontology, [i] presented in Being and Time (1962), posits the unitary phenomenon of “being-in-the-world”: Dasein and world form an inseparable whole. According to Heidegger, entities show up as meaningful only within a holistic context of relations, practices, and purposes. Hammers, for example, are not recognized as mere material objects; rather, their identity emerges through involvement in the activity of hammering, embedded in a network of significances (Heidegger, §§14–18). Now consider a bat’s echolocation: it cannot be understood by stripping away its integrated environment of echoes, prey, and flight paths. Its “world” is the meaningful network in which the bat’s perception makes sense. Without this context, the notion of “bat experience” collapses into empty abstraction. In a Heideggerian sense, we find the bat already “there,” being born into the world—being a bat is being a bat in the world.
Moreover, when we ask the question “what is it like to be a bat?” our imagination does not limit itself to just the bat. The imagery usually consists of the bat’s environment: the bat lives in a cave with rocks and the cave is usually dark and humid; the bat hunts prey in the dawn, and so on. Even searching for a generic stock photo of a bat, it is either placed against the sky or in the darkness of the night—never alone without its environment. As we see it, organisms and their environments are bound together in ways that make it impossible to characterize one without reference to the other when it comes to understanding mental life (Varela 1991, 164).
Environmental sense-making lies at the heart of any conscious experience. As Thompson (2007) succinctly puts it: “living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth significance and value. In this way, the environment becomes a place of valence, of attraction and repulsion, approach or escape” (158). In the bat’s case, we can picture how it learns the significance of certain echolocation signals through hunting prey or living in a cave with hundreds of other bats; it flies from tree to tree, “understanding” how wings can elevate it in the air. Di Paolo (2018) also states that “Sense-making is the capacity of an autonomous system to adaptively regulate its operation and its relation to the environment depending on the virtual consequences for its own viability as a form of life” (33). In other words, every living, breathing bat (as opposed to a conceptual, abstract bat) learns how to make sense of its environment and draws significance from it, otherwise it would not survive. Therefore, to assume that bats have experience at all(Nagel 1974, 438), it necessarily entails that the bat is physically situated in its environment and draws significance from its interaction with it.
Given Heidegger’s reminder that “being is being-in-the-world” (1962, 84) and enactive cognition’s insight that meaningful experience requires environmental involvement, it becomes increasingly difficult to insist that a creature can have consciousness in some overarching sense without occupying a specific conscious state tied to its current environment. The moment perception occurs—no matter how minimal—there is a “what-is-it-likeness” to that state. What we call creature consciousness may simply be a continuous series of particular conscious states. Each state reflects a specific instance of environmental engagement, making abstract notions of all-encompassing consciousness less relevant than the concrete states in which consciousness is actually realized.
Imagine the following example: a study of creature-consciousness that examines the contrast between consciousness and its absence through anesthesia (e.g., Alkire & Miller 2005)—as the test subject slowly regains her consciousness and sees the scientist, she might ask: “where am I?”—an attempt to place herself in relation to her environment, the world. Isherwood (2013) similarly describes the experience of waking up in his novel A Single Man: “waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now” (6)—suggesting that state consciousness—staring up at the ceiling—can even precede creature consciousness— “I am.”
Empirical research supports this integrated view. For example, Tononi (2004) proposes that being conscious at all is based on two phenomenological properties related to state consciousness: differentiation—among the availability of a vast number of conscious experiences—and integration—the unity of each experience (52). These properties manifest only through specific conscious states—there is no “general” consciousness separate from particular experiences. Furthermore, Alkire and others (2008) in their study on consciousness and anesthetics conclude that “having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative” (879)—the notion of consciousness itself implies the presence of at least some mental states that are experienced, even in a rudimentary way.
III. Which bat?
Furthermore, by suggesting that we “may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal’s structure and behavior” (438–439), Nagel’s question also presupposes that the “what-is-it-likeness” of a bat is instantiated by its “batness,” and the difference between a bat’s experience and ours is exclusively made by the difference between our essential physical properties—between “batness” and “humanness.” He writes: “Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid… It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth” (438–439).
Nagel’s bat reminds us of Platonism (see White 1987)—especially the Idea/Copy scheme. The Idea corresponds to the subjective experience of the bat—what it is like to be a bat. This pure, first-person reality is the “original,” unmediated essence of the bat’s consciousness, inaccessible to anyone else but the bat itself. Like the Platonic Idea, this subjective experience is treated as self-contained, pure, and unchanging—an ultimate reference point that cannot be fully grasped or represented by anything external to it. (“We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like.”) The Copy, on the other hand, is a human attempting to imagine or represent what it is like to be a bat—this includes scientific or imaginative efforts to approximate the bat’s “what-is-it-likeness” (e.g., imagining how echolocation might feel, studying bat behavior, or creating models of their sensory systems). These Copies are only analogical: they try to faithfully approximate the bat’s subjectivity using human frameworks of understanding—efforts grounded in the belief that, through analogy, we can approach or mirror the bat’s inner life. Nagel criticizes this approach: “our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited... Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat” (439-40).
Deleuze would call Nagel’s question “representational,”—one relying on assumptions of the Same (what it is likefor a bat to be a bat). It reduces thought to “identity, opposition, analogy, resemblance” (Deleuze 1968, 137). What it means to be different (e.g., a human’s what-is-it-likeness is different from the bat’s) is then conceived in these terms: “difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude” (138).
To illustrate Deleuze’s critique: by treating the bat’s subjective experience as a unified “what-is-it-likeness,” Nagel assumes its generality—something that is identical across all the particular instances of actual bats. This presupposes that difference must first be conceptualized as an identity: the bat’s “inner life” becomes an object defined in relation to the concept of a bat, and only to that concept. Non-conceptual difference (like differences between and among individual bats across time and space) therefore escapes this capture or is reduced to sameness. Moreover, the pre-existing conceptual difference between the bat and us places the bat’s subjectivity directly in opposition to human understanding, defining it by what it is not, effectively turning the question to, “What is it like to not be human?”
This is why Nagel ultimately concludes that humans can’t access the bat’s experience: the representational framework traps us in our own categories. Nagel’s fallacy—treating the bat’s what-is-it-likeness as a universal Same—collapses when we embrace Deleuze’s perspective on difference. Allowing us to ask: is it possible that at a particular point in time, a person’s experience in a specific situation bears more resemblance to a bat than to her own kind, and thus shattering the experiential boundary set out and limited by our species? (e.g., the metaphor that someone is blind as a bat) Aren’t all human metaphors referring to animals a partial rejection of concepts’ total dictation of experience?
Furthermore, by asking the question “what is it like to be a bat?” Nagel presupposes some form of a unified creature consciousness—a single “what-is-it-likeness” across all states a bat is in, and across all bats. This framework assumes that Nagel’s bat represents an archetype, reducing all bats to the generic concept of Microchiroptera (Nagel 1974, 439).
Deleuze in Difference and Repetition points out that generality involves two orders: the qualitative order of resemblances and the quantitative order of equivalences. (1968, 1). Qualitatively, the bats in the concept of “bat” are to resemble one another taxonomically (e.g., within the suborder Microchiroptera); quantitatively each bat in the concept is equivalent as=1. In conduct, each bat is equivalent and can stand in the place of any other. Nagel’s bat thus assumes a point of view according to which bata can be exchanged or substituted by another bat (batb, c, d…) as long as it shares resemblance to bata in relation to the given concept—the concept of a bat.
However, the unified creature consciousness that Nagel presupposes rapidly contracts until there are very few significant experiences left in the “what-is-it-likeness” of Nagel’s bat; as he acknowledges, there exist differences in “what-is-it-likeness” within species and thus between individuals. For instance, he mentions that the experience of a person who is deaf and blind from birth is inaccessible to an abled person (Nagel, 440). If we look further, we find such differences existing beyond broad distinctions like species boundaries: between abled people of different heights, between two twins, between the philosophical zombie and its original,[ii] between this bat and that bat, and finally, between a single bat when it is in a cave and when it is outside a cave. These differences cannot be captured by Nagel’s generic concept of “bat” and therefore, they either escape or get flattened by the archetype. When the various differences within a species and across geography and time are accounted for, the “what-is-it-likeness” of Nagel’s bat shrinks until the concept is empty. Nagel answers that we cannot experience what it is like to be a bat, because there is no “bat” to be experienced.
Since Nagel’s generic “bat” collapses under the weight of differences among individual bats, the notion of a unified creature consciousness also fails. Without a universal “batness,” there can be no single bat consciousness to speak of—only the dynamic flow of state consciousnesses arising from each bat’s singular interactions with its environment, as discussed in section II.
IV. What is haecceity?
Therefore, we must investigate a specific bat’s experience in a particular situation. Instead of asking “what is it like to be a bat?” as if searching for a universal essence, we must consider: “what is it like to be this bat, in this moment?” This shift from general categories to particular instances brings us to the concept of haecceity—the irreducible “thisness” that characterizes each moment of conscious experience.
The term haecceity, derived from the Latin haecceitas (meaning “thisness”), was introduced by John Duns Scotus to capture the unique, irreducible individuality of a particular being. For Scotus, haecceity is what makes something precisely this thing and not any other. Unlike metaphysical frameworks that emphasize universal categories or shared properties (like Plato’s theory of forms), Scotus’s haecceity focuses on singularity. It does not rest on whether that thing fits neatly into a category like “bat”; rather, it concerns the unique configuration of properties and conditions that belong to this particular bat.
In Ordinatio II, Scotus (1639) writes of haecceity as the “designated unity” of an individual, emphasizing the indivisible particularity that sets it apart from all else (7:474–475). For him, a bat’s haecceity would involve its specific features—this bat’s wing, its unique echolocation patterns, and its life trajectory. These individuating features are not abstractions but grounded in this bat’s concrete individuality. In Scotus’s metaphysical framework, haecceity operates as a principle of individuation that pinpoints a being’s irreducible “thisness,” ensuring that even within a classificatory scheme defined by universal categories—such as species and genus—and metaphysical constituents—such as form and matter—it retains an utterly unique identity. (7:483) Rather than allowing the individual to be subsumed under shared qualities or universal types, haecceity singles out the entity’s one-of-a-kind essence, guaranteeing that no matter how closely it may resemble others in its kind, it remains an indivisible unity whose particular “thisness” cannot be captured by or reduced to any general abstraction.
While Scotus still speaks of haecceity in a metaphysical system where essences and universals have their place, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari push the concept even further, away from any suggestion of stable essences. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write:
A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate substance or subject or by the organs it possesses or the function it fulfills…there is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected (260–261).
For them, haecceity is not about “what” something is—its essence—but about how it exists in the world. It is a spatiotemporal singularity, an assemblage of relations, movements, and intensities. For instance, a summer day is not an “essence of summer” but a unique convergence of affects: the heat, the buzzing of insects, the angle of light, the thickness of the air. Haecceity is not a thing or a property; it is an emergent event.
For example, imagine a bat flying through the night. Its haecceity includes the specific sound waves it emits, the subtle differences in timing and frequency of the echoes it processes, the insects it hunts, and the air currents it navigates. At the same time, its haecceity also includes its position in a larger ecological system: the balance of predator and prey, the seasonal rhythms that shape its activity, and the broader environmental conditions that affect its survival. All these elements are part of the bat’s unique “thisness,” understood not as a fixed identity but as an emergent constellation of relations and processes. These are not the “batness” of the bat; they are events, interactions, and encounters that constitute its unique existence.
For a more concrete illustration, consider the classic example often referred to as “the blueness of the blue” drawn from contemporary philosophy of mind. According to Tononi’s (2004) experiment on human perception of colors, the conscious experience of “blue” is not an isolated property tied solely to the activation of blue-selective neurons—the other groups of neurons within the main complex are essential to our conscious experience of blue even if they are not activated. Seeing blue is not just tied to the “blueness of the blue,” it arises from the entire network of interactions within a main complex of neurons—a relational process that integrates diverse elements contributing to our perception. Tononi explains: if the inactive element contributing to “seeing red” were removed, blue would not be experienced as blue anymore, but as some less differentiated color, perhaps not unlike those experienced by certain dichromats. If further elements of the main complex were removed, including those contributing to shapes, to sounds, to thoughts and so forth, one would soon drop to such a low level of consciousness that “seeing blue” would become meaningless: the “feeling” (and meaning) of the quale “blue” would have been eroded down to nothing. Indeed, while the remaining neural circuits may still be able to discriminate blue from other colors, they would do so very much as a photodiode does (52).
In Deleuzian terms, this highlights the haecceity of “seeing blue.” The experience is not about the essence of blue as a static property, and it is not just “the blueness of the blue” that the subject is perceiving. Haecceity situates the quale of blue as an event that unfolds through the interaction of countless elements—active and inactive, present and virtual. The blue is not simply “there” in isolation; the specificity of this moment of seeing blue is inseparable from the network of relationships that generate it: the firing of neurons selective for blue, the suppressed potential of those tuned to red, the shapes and sounds interwoven into the scene, and the broader cognitive and environmental context. These relations are not incidental—they constitute the singularity of the experience.
V. Becoming bat
Having established haecceity as central to understanding “what-is-it-likeness,” we must explain how experiential coherence emerges over time without appealing to static essences. While each moment of a bat’s echolocation represents a singular event, we recognize patterns that allow us to identify “bat-like” experiences. This apparent paradox—between singular moments and ongoing coherence—requires a rethinking of how consciousness unfolds through time.
In a productive misunderstanding, discussed by Deleuze (1987), Simondon translates haecceitas as “ecceité,” implying that ‘thisness’ has to do with ecce, “see here!”. It testifies to a concern with the real; singularity is not meant to be defined only negatively (as that which is irreducible, non-generalizable or non-substitutable), it is meant to have an empirical thickness, attested by the deictic particle “ecce”: this very body, this very event. Yet this suchness is nothing that could be essentially stabilized, and as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as a single singularity (540, note 33). If haecceity replaces the idea of stable essences, we must also explain how consistency arises over time.
The temptation is to answer with “the body!” But if we try to rely on the bat’s physical body as the unifier of experience, we would be adopting a perspective akin to physical reductionism and returning to Nagel’s conclusion. We would assume that simply having a delineated physical organism—bones, muscles, neural tissues—can explain the unique, irreducible “thisness” of the bat’s experience. But this is exactly what this paper argues against—even a physical body is not a static core that guarantees the bat’s unified singularity; it is itself involved in continuous interactions and transformations. The body is not a closed system from which we can deduce the entirety of the bat’s subjective life.
Simondon (1989) explains that the unity of singularity is neither provided by an underlying substance, nor by a consciousness to which it appears;[iii] it is exclusively provided through its own process of becoming (223). Simondon calls this a “genetic monism.” “Genetic” here refers to genesis, the process by which something comes into being, and “monism” indicates that there is ultimately only one level of reality—no separate realm of transcendent forms or stable substances. The unity that might appear to inhere in a being is not bestowed by an external principle or a final goal; it emerges from the continuous process of that being’s formation and change (Alloa 2017, 482). In other words, what holds a being together is not a static core or a final stage it aims toward, but the fact that it is always “in the making,” always transforming, always resolving new conditions.
By invoking genetic monism, Simondon (2009) suggests that neither transcendence nor a static immanence captures the reality of how beings come into existence. Instead, individuation is an ongoing, never fully completed process. (5–11). Simondon’s conclusion is thus radical: there is no such thing as individuality, just individuation. There is no fixed individuality to begin with—only individuation, which means the being is always more than what it currently is, always open to new configurations. Through this lens, the notion of a single underlying principle of individuation—a universal rule or essence that would apply to all beings—is rejected. Instead, each being’s unity is achieved only through the unfolding and resolving of metastable conditions, a continuous event of becoming that never settles into a final form.
Deleuze’s understanding of repetition completes this perspective. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994) argues that true repetition is never about restoring a static identity: “Repetition is not generality,” he writes, “[it] changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it” (70). In other words, repetition is not the empty copying of an original form, but the ongoing production of novelty through seemingly similar acts. Each “repetition” contains subtle differences—variations that alter conditions, responses, and potentials. Rather than reproducing sameness, repetition introduces difference into the system.
When we consider the bat’s interactions with its environment through this lens, each act of echolocation is not just a mechanical recurrence of the same behavior. Even if it may look similar from the outside, every emission of a call and every reception of an echo introduces minute deviations. Slight changes in the cave’s humidity, the flight patterns of insects, or the bat’s own wing positioning ensure that no two moments are identical. Over time, these differences accumulate. They refine the bat’s perceptual and motor capacities, shaping habits and tendencies, giving coherence to the bat’s way of being. The bat “becomes bat” through repeated engagements that never repeat identically. Repetition allows patterns to emerge without presupposing an essential core.
This interplay between difference and repetition helps bridge the gap between singular haecceities and the ongoing semblance of a unified subjectivity. While a single haecceity pinpoints one moment’s irreducible “what-is-it-like,” repetition ensures that these moments do not remain isolated. Instead, they form a continuous trajectory that makes the bat’s lived world feel consistent over time. This resonates with Simondon’s genetic monism, the view that “the only unity of a being is that of its becoming.” Monism here does not mean flattening everything into one substance but recognizing that there is a single continuous process of transformation, not two separate realms or stable substances. The bat’s being—and indeed any being—is not split into a secret inner essence and an external shifting world, nor into a timeless property and a changing environment. Everything is part of one ongoing flow of individuation.
VI. Conclusion
By focusing on difference, haecceity, and repetition, we trade the hunt of elusive essences for an understanding of consciousness as a fluid, open-ended interplay of relations and changes. The bat’s experience is neither static nor secret; it is a pattern formed over time by integrating differences through repetitive encounters. We need not become the bat to grasp this logic. Recognizing that what we seek—an essence—is simply not there, we are freed to see that consciousness unfolds as a process of becoming; each repetition generates new forms of coherence without ever crystallizing into a final, unchangeable identity.
This paper makes three main contributions. First, it challenges prevailing assumptions about the categorical difference between human and non-human consciousness, suggesting instead a spectrum of experiential modes shaped by environmental engagement. Second, it provides a novel theoretical framework for understanding how conscious experiences maintain coherence over time without appeal to static essences or representational content. Third, it offers methodological implications for the empirical study of consciousness, suggesting ways to investigate qualia as emergent phenomena rather than intrinsic properties.
This shift in perspective also suggests a new direction for the philosophy of mind. Researchers might draw inspiration from ecological psychology, enactive approaches, and ongoing individuation theories to better understand how minds form and reform themselves through continual interaction with their surroundings. We would pay closer attention to the conditions under which particular conscious states emerge, acknowledging that these states are inseparable from the networks of meaning, action, and potential that give rise to them. In practical terms, this could mean moving away from strict representational frameworks toward process-oriented ones, where difference and transformation are not problems but essential features of mental life.
Notes
[i] I cannot fully address Heidegger’s view on animal’s world within the scope and length of this paper. Most scholars regard Heidegger’s animal as lacking compared to human (i.e., the stone is “worldless” and the animal is “poor in the world”)—it is my view that even within Heidegger’s ontology, the animal is not completely deprived of world. For more in-depth discussions on this subject, see Didier Franck, “Being and the Living”, In Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (eds.), Who Comes After the Subject?, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 135–47.
[ii] Though not the focus of this paper, I find the notion of philosophical zombies inconceivable. If consciousness arises through ongoing, relational processes rather than a hidden essence, then physically identical beings must also share the same dynamic becoming. Philosophical zombies assume consciousness could vanish while all else remains identical, but this ignores how experience is inseparable from the conditions that produce it. Without a stable core to remove, there is no scenario where a “zombie” physically mirrors a conscious being yet lacks qualia.
[iii] This paper focuses more on the physicalist claim that one’s body can be a unifier of all experiences. I choose not to address the broad issue of whether (1) there exists a transcendental ego that unifies all our experiences, and (2) our experiences are truly unified.
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