Qualia is the experience of the living “Moment of Now” coursing from your senses, through your body’s bio-chemo-electical pathways & potentials, on to your brain.
In working on my Nagel’s Bat project, I was side tracked with an article written by Jack Maden. I appreciate my sampling base is limited, still he’s written the most interesting and accessible article regarding Nagel’s essay that I’ve read. Not surprisingly, he’s also offered me some excellent quotes to highlight the point I’m trying to make.
By Jack Maden | January 2026 | PhilosophyBreak.com
Thomas Nagel: What is it Like to be a Bat?
In his famous 1974 paper ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel argues that consciousness poses a unique problem for our standard approaches to explaining the world.
Mind you, by philosophical standards. Science standards foster an entirely different approach to this question. The above philosophical approach is idealistic, it also highlights human’s standard self-absorbed, self-serving approach to nature — I will suggest that is what stands in our way to rationally understand that little non-stop rambling voice in your mind
Jack Maden: “Does consciousness arise from the brain? Do certain brain processes always give rise to certain conscious experiences? Or is the relationship between mind and matter more mysterious?”
Please notice philosopher’s deal with idealistic notions.
It makes no sense to consider the brain as its own discrete unit.
The brain barely interacts with the world. It does however have a myriad of communication and transport channels reaching out to every millimeter of our body, while our body is busy doing all the experiencing.
After all, it is our body, eyes, nose, fingers, lips, mouth, tongue, etc, doing all the actual physical experiencing of having a meal. The experience is then filtered, processed, and transmitted through a whole variety of means, to the brain. Which in turn, responds with its own non-stop signaling cascades back to the body, as the brain monitors the situation for further developments.
Qualia is that Moment of Now, when the experience rushes through every fiber of one’s body. That is the experience of the experience. Nothing else can offer that moment — it’s like the difference between a postcard and being there.
Sure our brain is the conductor! Still without the symphony, the conductor is nothing. My complaint is that philosophers seem to have logic-ed that detail out of their meditations.
Regarding the importance of the essence of your living body — think about what biology has taught us. The legacy that is your living body, has been handed down and build upon for over a half a billion years worth of generations. We possess layers of internal consciousness and communication channels totally beyond our introspective-conscious mind’s ability to perceive.
It matters to personally internalize the understanding and appreciate how your interior body possesses knowledge, agendas, and strategies beyond our ability to know — science has taught us they are there, it is our duty to do the homework to understand recent insights.
Jack Maden: Nagel’s 1974 essay challenge reductionist approaches to the philosophy of mind: “[A]n organism has conscious mental states,” Nagel writes, if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism.
Nagel calls this the “subjective character of experience”. It is also known in the philosophical literature as qualitative experience, phenomenal experience, ‘raw feels’ and qualia.
The point about conscious experience is that there is something it is like for the experiencer to see x, hear y, or feel z, and it is through our subjective conscious experiences that we each know the world.
The problem for reductionist approaches is that it is not clear how physical descriptions of the brain can account for this subjective character of experience.
To know the experience of an experience requires more than a brain, it requires the body doing the experiencing. We will never understand the experience of the experience, the fleeting moment of qualia, without explicitly including the body. My gosh, that’s what all the communication is about to keep self informed and in line, in the first place.
To me this entire vague argument about the “experience of the experience” sounds like complaining about the fact that we can never know what is going on within someone else’s mind, let alone a different creature’s sense of its experience.
At it’s worst, we get into hubristic wormholes conjecturing that experience doesn’t even exist unless we can define it physically, until we can somehow prove it to our impossible standards and expectations.
Sorry but that is the stuff of late night scotch and pot discussions and intellectual entertainment. All fine and good and fun. Still, not the stuff of serious efforts to understand the true essence of oneself in light of this biological reality we and the actual factual world exists within.
The formula is pretty straightforward.
Senses + body + brain + interacting (interior and exterior) produce consciousness and mind.
The brain is certainly the master conductor, but it is dependent on the symphony of our body to produce our music of consciousness. To trivialize those connections is wrong, and a throwback to medieval human exceptionalism thinking.
