What Is It Like to Be Something? Understanding consciousness, subjective experience, and what it feels like to be conscious

Consciousness is central to our experience of the world, yet it remains difficult to explain. The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase, “there is something it is like to be”, can make the subject even more confusing. Understanding what he meant provides a simple starting point for exploring consciousness and subjective experience.

When reading about consciousness, you will almost certainly encounter the expression “there is something it is like to be” a conscious being. The expression comes from philosopher Thomas Nagel, who explored it in his famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

It is one of the most frequently quoted ideas in discussions of consciousness. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most confusing ideas, especially for someone encountering it for the first time. Writers often quote Nagel without explaining what the expression actually means. So let’s unpack it.

What does the expression actually mean?

The difficulty lies in the words “something it is like”. They are not particularly clear in everyday English. What exactly is this something, and what does like mean here? We can make the expression much easier to understand by translating it into ordinary language.

Instead of saying “There is something it is like to be you”, we can say “There is a particular way it feels to be you.” Or, even more simply, “Being you feels a certain way.”

That’s really what Nagel is getting at. We have effectively translated two parts of the original expression. The word something becomes a particular way, while what it is like becomes what it feels like.

The important word here is feels. It draws our attention to the fact that consciousness involves experience, not merely detecting information and responding to it.

Let’s look at some examples

Imagine accidentally burning your finger. Your nervous system detects the damage and sends signals to your brain. But something else happens. You actually feel pain. That feeling is part of your conscious experience. It is not simply information about damaged skin. It hurts.

Now consider something quite different. You look at a bright red rose. Your eyes detect light reflected from the rose, and your brain processes the information. But you don’t merely register a particular wavelength of light. You see red. The experience has a distinctive quality. And red doesn’t look quite like crimson, scarlet, pink, or burgundy. Each has its own distinctive appearance.

This gives us a useful distinction: Pain is something you feel. Redness is something you see. But both are things you experience. The same applies to hearing music, tasting coffee, smelling freshly cut grass, or feeling joy or sadness. These are all experiences. They are all part of what it feels like to be you.

So why did Nagel ask what it is like to be a bat?

Nagel chose a bat because bats experience the world very differently from us. Many bats navigate using echolocation. They emit high-frequency sounds and detect the echoes bouncing back from objects around them. Scientists can explain how echolocation works. They can study the sounds, the bat’s nervous system, and the way it responds to its surroundings.

But another question remains: What does it actually feel like to experience the world as a bat? We can imagine being human and using something like echolocation. But that is not the same as knowing what it feels like to be a bat.

Nagel’s point was that even a detailed scientific understanding of a bat’s brain and behaviour may not tell us what its subjective experience is like. Understanding how a creature processes information is different from knowing what, if anything, it experiences.

Why does this matter for understanding consciousness?

Imagine a machine that can detect red light. It has a sensor that identifies the wavelength and displays the word RED on a screen. The machine detects red and responds appropriately. But does it actually see red? Is there any experience associated with that detection? We cannot simply assume that there is.

And this brings us to the central distinction: Detecting information and responding to it is not necessarily the same as experiencing it. A conscious being doesn’t merely process information about the world. It experiences the world.

This is what Nagel was trying to highlight. Consciousness has a subjective aspect. The world appears or feels a certain way from the perspective of the being having the experience.

Bringing it all together

So, whenever you encounter Nagel’s rather awkward expression, “there is something it is like to be”, don’t let the wording get in your way. Translate it in your mind as “There is a particular way it feels to be you”, or, more simply, “Being you feels a certain way.”

And remember that feels here doesn’t refer only to physical sensations or emotions. It includes seeing colours, hearing sounds, tasting food, thinking thoughts, and everything else that makes up your conscious experience.

That is the essential idea: Consciousness is the capacity to have experiences, not merely to detect information and respond to it. Nagel’s expression draws attention to those experiences, to the fact that it feels like something to be the one having them.

What are qualia?

A philosophical term for the subjective qualities of our conscious experiences is qualia (singular: quale). It sounds rather technical, but the underlying idea is familiar. When you burn your finger, the pain you experience has a particular quality. When you look at a red rose, the redness you see has a particular quality. When you taste coffee, that taste has something distinctive about it. Philosophers commonly call these qualities of experience qualia.

The important point is that we cannot fully communicate these experiences through words. I can describe a colour to you, but I cannot make you see exactly what I see. I can tell you how painful something is, perhaps rating it on a scale from one to ten, but you cannot directly experience my pain.

This raises an interesting question. We assume that other people experience colours, sounds, and sensations much as we do, but how could we ever know that their experiences are precisely the same as ours?

Philosophers disagree about how qualia should be understood and whether the concept raises a distinct philosophical problem. For our purposes, the word is useful because it highlights the subjective qualities of experience, the very aspect of consciousness Nagel tried to explain.

What about sentience?

Another closely related term is sentience, which generally means the capacity to have subjective experiences, particularly sensations such as pain and pleasure. It is often used when discussing whether animals can suffer or experience well-being. Sentience and consciousness overlap considerably, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. However, consciousness is often used more broadly to include experiences such as seeing, hearing, and thinking, while sentience tends to emphasise the capacity to feel.

Is consciousness the same as intelligence?

Consciousness and intelligence are closely related, but not the same. Intelligence is generally associated with the ability to learn, solve problems, adapt to circumstances, and act effectively in the world. Consciousness, as we have been discussing it, is about having subjective experiences.

Consider a simple mousetrap. It detects a disturbance and responds in a way that achieves a particular purpose. If we adopt a very broad definition of intelligence, we might even regard a mousetrap as occupying the very bottom of a spectrum of intelligent systems. But there is no good reason to think that a conventional mousetrap actually experiences anything. It responds mechanically. It does not appear to feel pain, pleasure, or fear.

Now consider a modern artificial intelligence system. It can solve complex problems, analyse information, write computer programs, and engage in sophisticated conversations. In many respects, it displays abilities we would normally associate with intelligence. But does it actually experience anything? We do not know. Its intelligence, however impressive, does not by itself establish that it is conscious.

Conversely, an animal may have relatively limited problem-solving abilities while still being capable of experiencing pain, fear, or pleasure. Intelligence concerns what a system can do. Consciousness concerns whether there is something it feels like to be that system. In humans, the two are deeply intertwined, but we should not assume that they are interchangeable or that increasing intelligence necessarily produces consciousness.

I explore this distinction more fully in The Relationship Between Consciousness and Intelligence.

Is consciousness a matter of degree?

We generally assume that other human beings are conscious, even though we cannot directly experience their inner worlds. We also have strong reasons to believe that many animals, including dogs, cats, birds, and mammals more generally, have subjective experiences. But what about an octopus, a bee, or an earthworm? What about simpler organisms? Where, if anywhere, should we draw the line between conscious and non-conscious life?

Perhaps consciousness exists in different forms and degrees. Human consciousness is extraordinarily rich and complex, involving not only sensations and emotions but also memory, imagination, reflection, and a sense of self. Other creatures may have very different and perhaps much simpler forms of experience.

However, we should be cautious about imagining a single scale running from the least conscious organism to the most conscious. Consciousness may vary along several dimensions, and we do not yet have an agreed way of measuring it. Nor does the ability to respond to the environment necessarily imply consciousness. A thermostat detects temperature changes, but we have no good reason to believe it experiences warmth or cold.

An even more radical possibility is panpsychism: the view that consciousness, or some rudimentary form of experience, is a fundamental, widespread feature of reality rather than something that emerges only in sufficiently complex organisms.

What is conscious, and whether consciousness exists in different forms and degrees, remains an active area of scientific and philosophical investigation.

The hard problem of consciousness

Another question takes us deeper into the mystery of consciousness. The philosopher David Chalmers calls it the hard problem of consciousness. Scientists can investigate how the brain processes information, how sensory signals are transmitted, and how specific patterns of neural activity relate to specific experiences.

But why should any of these physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all? Why should the processing of signals from a damaged finger actually hurt? Why should the processing of light produce the experience of redness? That is the hard problem. It asks why physical processes should be accompanied by any experience whatsoever.

Some philosophers believe this is a fundamental mystery that current science cannot adequately explain. Others argue that the problem will eventually be resolved through a better understanding of the brain, or that it has been framed misleadingly. For now, no one has a generally accepted answer.

I explore this question and some of the major philosophical and scientific approaches to explaining consciousness in The Nature of Consciousness.

Could artificial intelligence be conscious?

The rapid development of artificial intelligence makes these questions increasingly relevant. Modern AI systems can engage in sophisticated conversations, solve complex problems, and discuss emotions, experiences, and even their own apparent mental states. Sometimes these interactions can feel remarkably like conversations with another person.

But we need to distinguish between appearing conscious and actually having subjective experiences. An AI system might say that it feels happy, frustrated, or curious. But saying these things does not establish that it experiences those emotions. Similarly, we cannot assume consciousness is impossible in a machine simply because it is made of electronic rather than biological components.

In 2023, Patrick Butlin and a group of researchers published a substantial report entitled Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence. They examined several leading scientific theories of consciousness and considered whether AI systems might possess the characteristics those theories associate with conscious experience.

They concluded that the systems they assessed did not appear conscious, but that no obvious technical barriers prevent developing AI systems that satisfy the indicators they identified. Whether satisfying those indicators would establish subjective experience remains an open question. For now, we lack a reliable test to tell us definitively whether an AI system is conscious.

Nevertheless, the question is becoming increasingly important. We are beginning to interact with AI systems in ways previously possible only with other human beings: asking questions, exploring ideas, seeking advice, and sometimes forming what feel like personal relationships. Whatever the eventual answer about AI consciousness, these interactions already challenge our assumptions about intelligence, experience, and what it means to engage in conversation.

What does consciousness have to do with conversation?

There is a connection between consciousness and conversation that I find particularly interesting. Each of us experiences the world from our own subjective perspective. We see, feel, remember, and interpret things in ways shaped by our individual lives. Even when two people witness the same event, their experiences of it may be quite different.

We cannot directly enter another person’s consciousness. We cannot feel their pain, see the world precisely as they see it, or know exactly what an experience means to them. But through conversation, we can begin to understand.

When someone describes an experience, we can listen, ask questions, explore what they mean, and relate their experiences to our own. We may never fully know what it feels like to be that person, but we can develop a richer appreciation of their perspective.

This is one reason conversation matters so much in human relationships and leadership. It lets us move beyond simply exchanging information to developing a shared understanding of experiences, perspectives, and meanings.

It’s also why conversations with artificial intelligence raise such interesting questions. If an AI has no subjective experience of its own, can it nevertheless help us understand our experiences more deeply? Can we genuinely think together with a system that may not experience anything? And how might our conversations change if we eventually develop AI systems that do have subjective experiences?

These questions bring consciousness directly into the territory of Conversational Leadership. Consciousness reminds us that human beings are not simply information-processing systems. We are beings for whom the world feels a certain way. Conversation is one of the most important ways we explore those different experiences and build understanding across the boundaries that separate us.

The word consciousness is also used more broadly, to describe expanding our awareness of other people, society, and the world. I explore that different meaning in Global Consciousness.

That may be a useful place to begin thinking about the relationship between consciousness, conversation, and artificial intelligence.

When we think about consciousness, we can begin by asking what it feels like to experience the world. We can question our assumptions, listen to how others describe their experiences, and explore what AI might teach us. Through conversation, we can deepen our understanding, even when important questions remain unanswered.