The way I understand it the second thing is the observer of the organism, the person posing the question. The definition seems to be sort of equivalent to the statement "an entity is conscious IFF the sentence 'what is it like to be that entity' is well-posed".

"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states

"What is it like to be a bat" => the subjective experience of a bat is what it is like => a bat has conscious mental states

Basically it seems like a roundabout way of equating "the existence of subjective experience" with "the existence of consciousness"

edit: one of the criticism papers that the wiki cites also provides a nice exploration of the usage of the word "like" in the definition, which you might be interested to read (http://www.phps.at/texte/HackerP1.pdf)

> It is important to note that the phrase 'there is something which it is like for a subject to have experience E' does not indicate a comparison. Nagel does not claim that to have a given conscious experience resembles something (e.g. some other experience), but rather that there is something which it is like for the subject to have it, i.e. 'what it is like' is intended to signify 'how it is for the subject himself'.

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brudgers 6 days ago | parent [-]

"What is it like to be a rock" => no thing satisfies that answer => a rock does not have unconscious mental states

How do you know that?

Philosophically, of course.

I mean sure you can’t cut a rock open and see any mental states. But you can no more cut a human open and see mental states either.

Now I am no way suggesting that you don’t have a model for ascribing mental states to humans. Or dogs. Or LLM’s. Just that all models, however useful are still models. Not having a model capable of ascribing mental states to rocks does not preclude rocks having mental states.

	▲	tech_ken 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> How do you know that? Well you don't, and my reading of the article was that Nagle also recognized that it was basically an assumption which he granted to bats specifically so as to have a concrete example (one which was suitably unobjectionable, seems like he thought bats 'obviously' had some level of consciousness). The actual utility of this definition is not, as far as my understanding goes, to demarcate between what is and what is not conscious. It seems more like he's using it to establish a sort of "proof-by-contradiction" against the proposal that consciousness admits a totally materialistic description. Something like: (1) If you say that A is conscious, then you also must say that A has subjective self-experience (which is my understanding of the point of the whole "what it is to be like" thing) (2) Any complete description/account of the consciousness of A must contain a description of the subjective self-experience of A because of (1) (3) Subjective self-experience cannot be explained in purely materialistic/universal terms, because it's subjective (so basically by definition) => Consciousness cannot be fully described in a materialistic framework, because of the contradiction between (2) and (3) > Just that all models, however useful are still models Totally agree with this, I think you're just misunderstanding the specific utility of this model (which is this specific argument about what can be described using human language). My example with the rock was kind of a specific response to OP illustrate how I understood the whole "what it is to be like" thing to be equivalent to (1). If I'd had a bit more forethought I probably would have made those arrows in the line you've quoted bidirectional.