"Music can give you access to someone's point of view."
— Finn Streuper (Onnoquist) · Super-Sonic Jazz interview
Movement I
Press Play — The Question Arrives
Waveform · Bat echolocation · 20–200 kHz · multiple harmonics
Begin with sound. Before the first argument, before any philosophy has been stated, there is a saxophone — recognisably human, made of breath and metal — dissolving, slowly, into something stranger. This is the experience of pressing play on Finn Streuper's debut album, What It's Like to Be a Bat. Jazz merging with electronics. The familiar sliding into the alien. Neither fully one thing nor the other.
This tension is the essay's first fact, experienced before Nagel has been named.
"I'm not trying to solve the question, but music can give you access to someone's point of view."
— Finn Streuper
Streuper — who records under the name Onnoquist — built this album alone, on a computer, with saxophone recordings borrowed from the Conservatorium. Eighteen songs. Each one an attempt to illustrate what it is like to be a bat. The album reached the world through the Instagram account @supersonicjazz, which shared each track alongside informative captions and oscilloscope visualisations. One video accumulated a million views.
The oscilloscope visuals are the album's signature: each track rendered as a waveform on screen, sound made visible without being fully explained. A rendering that is precise but incomplete. Like Nagel's own speculative proposal — an "objective phenomenology" — it points toward something real while acknowledging it cannot capture everything. The waveform is not the sound. The map is not the territory.
If music can give access to a point of view — then what, exactly, is a point of view? What is at stake in claiming that a bat has one? Enter the paper the album was made to answer.
Movement II
The Problem — What Objectivity Leaves Out
Everything we know about a bat
Order
Chiroptera
Echolocation frequency
20,000 – 200,000 Hz Ultrasonic · inaudible to humans
Echo return delay
1 – 20 milliseconds
Spatial discrimination
Distance · size · shape · motion · texture Comparable to human vision
Neural architecture
Brain correlates outgoing impulses with returning echoes
Classification
Mammal · warm-blooded Almost certainly conscious
All of the above answers only
WHAT IT IS ABOUT A BAT.
But what is it like to be a bat?
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. The subjective character of experience — the simple, bewildering fact that there is something it is like to be you — is not captured by any of the data in the column to the left.
You can take an X-ray of a bat, dissect it, measure its blood group, chart its neural architecture. You can know, in Nagel's phrase, everything there is to know about a bat — and still not have touched the question. The question is not about structure. It is about experience.
And experience is not accessible from the outside. Not by accumulating more data. Not by imagining yourself hanging upside down at dusk catching insects in your mouth.
Because that would only tell you what it is like for you to behave as a bat behaves. Not what it is like for the bat to be itself.
"What would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?"
— Thomas Nagel · "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" · The Philosophical Review · 1974
Michael Pollan · A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness (2026)
Fifty years after Nagel's paper, Michael Pollan publishes a book and discovers that the question has not been answered — it has proliferated. Where Nagel had one bat, Pollan has a menagerie: plants (researchers now search for rudimentary experience in flora), artificial intelligences (can feelings be engineered?), the chemically altered mind itself — what it is like to be a self temporarily dissolved by a psychedelic compound.
Each new candidate for consciousness is another bat. Another possible site of experience that we cannot enter from the outside. The hard problem has not softened in fifty years. If anything, the expansion of potential conscious beings makes Nagel's original question feel more urgent, not less. Every garden, every server farm, every psychedelic session poses the same challenge: what is it like in there?
Both writers arrive at the same recognition: consciousness is not a problem that will be solved by accumulating more objective facts. It requires a different kind of inquiry — one that takes subjectivity seriously as a mode of knowledge, not just as data to be explained away.
Movement III
The Music — Access, Not Answer
By this point in the essay — and the album — something has happened to you. Not knowledge, exactly. Something harder to name.
Streuper's music has been working on you while the philosophy asked its questions. The mix of real saxophone and constructed electronics has been enacting what the philosophy describes: the familiar and the alien, neither fully one thing nor the other. The listener is somewhere between two worlds.
The album does not answer Nagel's question because the question cannot be answered. But it creates conditions in which the question is felt — not merely understood.
Philosophy describes. Music displaces. To feel the question — to experience the vertigo of it rather than holding it at arm's length as an intellectual puzzle — is a different and not lesser mode of engagement with it.
Pollan's book is particularly attentive to the role of music in psychedelic therapy sessions: a specific, well-documented context in which music is used not as accompaniment but as vehicle. It holds the space when the self has temporarily vacated. It guides the ego-dissolution. In this context, music is not merely art. It is consciousness-altering technology — reaching places that language and argument cannot.
This connects back to Streuper's intuition: not full access, not perfect access, but something — a leaning toward, a temporary loosening of the assumption that your perspective is the only one that exists.
We cannot know what it's like to be a bat. Nagel was right. Pollan's book confirms it while expanding the roster of thresholds we cannot cross. And Streuper's album does not cross it either — but it stands at the edge and makes a sound, and the sound carries something.
There is something it is like to be you, reading this, listening to the last track fade. That fact — irreducible, unreachable from the outside — is the thing Nagel named, Pollan tracked across fifty years of science and experience, and Streuper tried to make audible in eighteen songs.
The bat hangs in perfect darkness.
Its world made entirely of echoes. Unknowable. Real.
Sources
Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4 (Oct. 1974), pp. 435–450. Duke University Press.