Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” unfortunately does not endeavor to answer its titular question. (As a friend put it, it should actually be called “We Will Never Know What It’s Like to Be a Bat, Alas.”) But Nagel is not even interested in questions of batness. His project is to interrogate “the mind–body problem,” the struggle in philosophy or psychology to reduce the mind and consciousness to objective, physical terms. But around the edges of Nagel’s project, like tasty crumbs, we can grab at some useful ideas for imagining minds even stranger than bats: the minds of intelligent aliens.
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