The nature of consciousness has been a subject of interest in philosophy since ancient times. Several ideas have been proposed including dualism, behaviorism, etc. One such approach to addressing consciousness and how the mind works is physicalism. Physicalism is a way of describing mental states as physical manifestations of the central nervous system (Armstrong, 1980). As a result, the approach primarily adopts a more scientific worldview by attributing changes in the mind as a sign of chemical events in the brain. For a physicalist, the mind and its components are primarily matter and it is the interactions between them that facilitate the creation of behaviors between people (Armstrong, 1980). However, several critics have raised doubts against this view, including Thomas Nagel in “What Does It Mean to Be a Bat?” Nagel argues that since one cannot truly understand the subjective experience of being another conscious thing, one cannot physically break down consciousness as a component of matter. Nagel argues that the idea of breaking down consciousness into physical components only establishes the objective view of experiencing something. It assumes that adopting such an approach eliminates differences between conscious beings and establishes commonality as the primary goal. However, this view is misunderstood since science, from which physicalism adopts most of its principles, presents various examples illustrating variation between species. In fact, the very idea of breaking things down has shown us how different we are as beings. For example, no person in the world, except identical twins, shares the same genetic information. Although there are several areas in the gene that may have been changed a lot in the last twenty years due to technological advances. So, to truly address the issue of consciousness, we should be able to look at the problem through the mind of a physicalist because it is the only form of thinking that explains and keeps pace with the development of new science. It allows us to understand consciousness with every new thing we discover about the brain, especially the most recent advances in neuroscience. The example of the impossibility of imagining what it means to be a bat may be a misunderstood view of physicalism because it does not take into account future advances in the field of the study of consciousness. This is not to say that physicalism is actually the only answer to questions about the mind, but it is certainly one of the strongest possibilities when it comes to uncovering the secrets of consciousness..
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