A reference to Nagel's classic What is it like to be a bat?: What is it Like to be a Man? A quote from the essay:
If science offers a complete account of nature, then it must be able to offer a complete account of human conscious experience, since human conscious experience is a feature of nature. It must be able to say something about what it is like to be a man. Accordingly, for several decades, a relentless effort has been undertaken by those in the disciplines of cognitive science and philosophy of mind to conceptualize such an account – an explanation of the mental in terms of the purely physical. The results of this endeavor are unambiguous – it has been a complete disaster. One would be hard pressed to identify, in all of intellectual history, a philosophical detour more obstinately barren, more improgressive, more tangled up in empty verbiage, more devoid of genuine insight, more irrelevant to life as it is actually lived, than is to be discovered in contemporary philosophy of mind. John Searle described the futile history of this materialist project as follows:
One sees this pattern over and over. A materialist thesis is advanced. But the thesis encounters difficulties; the difficulties take different forms, but they are always manifestations of an underlying deeper difficulty, namely, the thesis in question denies obvious facts that we all know about our own minds. And this leads to ever more frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who insist on preserving the facts. After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters new difficulties, only the new difficulties are not so new – they are really the same old difficulties.
