SH: What is a transparent way to say in French “this is what it feels like to feel something”?
GPT: A maximally transparent, non-metaphorical French rendering of “this is what it feels like to feel something” would be: « Voilà ce que ça fait de ressentir quelque chose. » This is idiomatic, minimal, and avoids philosophical embellishment.
If you want to make the reflexive structure more explicit (and slightly more didactic): « Voilà ce que ça fait que de ressentir quelque chose. » (grammatically fine, a bit heavier)
If you want to foreground feeling-as-feeling (closer to your de-weaselled usage): « Voilà ce que ça fait de sentir qu’on sent quelque chose. » (more explicit, but risks sounding artificial)
For most contexts—especially where you want the sentence to carry its weight without commentary—the first version is the best balance of clarity, naturalness, and neutrality.
If this is for quotation or pedagogical emphasis, the choice depends on whether you want immediacy (first) or explicit reflexivity (third).
SH: “ce que ça fait de” rather than “à quoi ça ressemble de” ?
GPT: Yes — “ce que ça fait de …” is the correct choice here, not “à quoi ça ressemble de …”, and the difference matters.
- « ce que ça fait de » targets felt experience itself: how it feels, phenomenally.
- « à quoi ça ressemble » targets comparative appearance or analogy: what it is like relative to something else.
In ordinary French, ressentir / ça fait is the construction used for pain, pleasure, effort, emotion, and bodily or affective states:
- Voilà ce que ça fait d’avoir mal.
- Voilà ce que ça fait d’être amoureux.
By contrast, « à quoi ça ressemble » invites description by resemblance:
- À quoi ça ressemble, un trou noir ?
- À quoi ça ressemble, la vie sur Mars ?
Applied to feeling, « à quoi ça ressemble » subtly shifts the burden from having the feeling to describing it by comparison, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid in a de-weaseled account of sentience.
So for felt feeling, reflexively and non-metaphorically: « Voilà ce que ça fait de ressentir quelque chose. » That is the idiomatic, phenomenologically direct French equivalent.
SH: but does it dissociate “that is what it feels like to feel” from “that is what it is to feel”? (Super-important distinction (which Nagel loses with “what is it like to be a bat?” rather than “what does it feel like to be a bat?”.
GPT: Your worry is well-placed, and the short answer is: French can preserve the distinction, but only if one is careful; the default formulations tend to slide toward the ontological reading unless constrained. Let me be precise.
1. The danger point
In French, as in English, there is a latent ambiguity between:
- the phenomenal fact: what it feels like (felt feeling)
- the constitutive claim: what it is to feel (an account of the nature of feeling)
Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat?” collapses the two by using “is,” inviting metaphysical inflation. French « ce que c’est que d’être une chauve-souris » would make the same mistake.
2. Why « ce que ça fait de » is safer
The construction « ce que ça fait de … » is experiential and occurrent, not constitutive.
- Voilà ce que ça fait d’avoir mal.
- Voilà ce que ça fait de courir un marathon.
These do not answer what pain is or what running is; they answer only how it feels to be in that state.
So: « Voilà ce que ça fait de ressentir quelque chose. » is correctly read as: This is the felt character of feeling something. —not as: This is what feeling consists in.
3. What to avoid: Anything using « ce que c’est que », « en quoi consiste », or « ce que signifie » will drift toward what it is to feel:
- ❌ « Voilà ce que c’est que de ressentir quelque chose. »
(ontological / constitutive) - ❌ « En quoi consiste le fait de ressentir… »
4. If you want maximal insulation
If the context is philosophically hostile or you want belt-and-suspenders clarity, you can force the phenomenal reading:
- « Voilà ce que ça fait, du point de vue du ressenti, de ressentir quelque chose. »
- « Voilà ce que ça fait, tel que ça se ressent, de ressentir quelque chose. »
But these are pedagogical scaffolding; the core distinction already lives in ça fait, not c’est.
Bottom line:
French does allow you to keep feels-like strictly apart from is-to-feel, but only by anchoring the sentence in felt occurrence rather than ontological description.
« Ce que ça fait de… » does that; Nagel’s formulation does not.
SH: Perspicuous exegesis — and seems [to this magyarophone] indirectly related to the non-phenomenological predicate “je fais de la fièvre” [*làzat gyàrtok*] instead of “j’ai de la fièvre” [làzam van] which implicitly implies làzasnak érzem magamat…
GPT: Yes — that is a relevant parallel, and not merely an etymological curiosity. French « faire de la fièvre » is striking precisely because it externalizes the state as an ongoing process or manifestation, rather than as a possessed condition:
- faire de la fièvre → something is happening (a physiological production)
- avoir de la fièvre → one has a state/property
Hungarian makes the contrast even sharper, as you note:
- lázat gyárt(ok) (“I am producing fever”) — processual, non-introspective
- lázam van (“I have fever”) — stative, ownership-like
- lázasan érzem magamat — explicitly phenomenological
The key point, aligned with your concern about Nagel, is this:
“faire de la fièvre / lázat gyártani” describes the occurrence without committing to how (or whether) it feels.
Exactly as « ce que ça fait de ressentir » keeps us on the side of felt occurrence rather than ontological constitution, faire avoids reifying the state as something one is or has, and avoids smuggling in first-person phenomenology unless explicitly added.
So the parallel is not incidental. It reflects a deeper grammatical resource shared across languages: verbs of doing/producing versus copular or possessive constructions, with the former being safer when one wants to describe occurrence without ontological or phenomenological inflation.
Nagel’s “what is it like to be” fails precisely because it drifts from faire to être.
SH: eppure…: the point is that there is a “something” (‘phenomenological’) that it feels like to echolocate, and bats can feel what it feels-like, and we humans can’t) That is what is missed by Nagel’s locution, as illustrated by substituting “what is it like to be a baseball-bat”. Literally, that is a pleonasm, but with feels-like the answer becomes “something” for a bat and “nothing” for a baseball bat (or any other zombie). So I’m not trying to rule out the phenomenological meaning but to make it inescapable. Does “ça fait” do the job too?
GPT: Yes — “ça fait” can do the job, but only if it is allowed to bite, i.e., if the construction is explicitly tied to the existence vs. non-existence of felt content. Let me make the distinction sharp.
1. Your target distinction (made explicit)
You are not trying to avoid phenomenology; you are trying to make it ineliminable:
- There is something it feels like to echolocate — for a bat.
- There is nothing it feels like to be a baseball bat — or a zombie.
- This “something vs. nothing” is the datum.
- Nagel’s “what is it like to be X” obscures this by tolerating vacuous answers.
2. Does « ça fait » force the “something”?
Ordinarily, « ça fait » presupposes some felt effect if and only if the subject is sentient:
- Qu’est-ce que ça fait d’avoir mal ? → necessarily something
- Qu’est-ce que ça fait d’être une pierre ? → rien (or category error)
So when properly deployed, « ça fait » already encodes the contrast you want:
« Pour une chauve-souris, ça fait quelque chose d’écholocaliser.
Pour une batte de baseball, ça ne fait rien. »
That opposition is natural French and is not metaphorical.
3. Why this succeeds where Nagel fails
Nagel’s “what is it like to be…” allows a slide into:
- structural description,
- imaginative analogy,
- third-person modeling.
By contrast, « qu’est-ce que ça fait » demands an answer on a single dimension:
Is there anything it feels like, or not?
That yields exactly your diagnostic contrast:
- bat → quelque chose
- baseball bat / zombie → rien
4. If you want absolute inescapability
You can make the contrast explicit without philosophical scaffolding:
- « Ça fait quelque chose pour une chauve-souris, et rien du tout pour une batte de baseball. »
- « S’il n’y a rien que ça fait, il n’y a rien qui est ressenti. »
This leaves no room for ontological inflation or metaphor.
Bottom line
Yes: « ça fait » not only allows the phenomenological “something,” it forces the something-vs-nothing distinction when used contrastively. Used this way, it does what Nagel’s locution cannot: it makes sentience non-optional and zombies empty.
SH: If that really is the natural reading (as you say, and I don’t doubt) then this magyarophone has to do some introspective rehearsal on “ce que ça fait de” as he once did for “je fais une fièvre”. (A sub chapter of interlingual alignment of both idioms and [chomskian] parameters…)
GPT: That strikes me as the right diagnosis. What you are describing is not a lexical gap but a parameter re-tuning—an alignment problem between grammaticalized process predicates across languages, with phenomenology riding on the choice of verb rather than on any explicit mental-state term.
Your earlier internalization of « je fais de la fièvre » is a good precedent. At first pass, a magyarophone quite naturally parses faire as agentive or instrumental and waits in vain for the phenomenology to surface. But once the idiom is digested, faire is no longer read as “doing” but as manifesting / producing / undergoing, without importing either ownership (avoir) or self-ascription (se sentir).
« ce que ça fait de… » works the same way. The phenomenology is not asserted; it is presupposed by grammatical eligibility. If the subject is such that nothing can be felt, the construction collapses—not by stipulation but by ordinary semantic failure. That is precisely why it can carry your “something vs. nothing” load without metaphysical overstatement.
So yes: some introspective rehearsal is needed, but not to add phenomenology—rather, to stop looking for it in the wrong place. In French, as in Hungarian in these cases, the phenomenological commitment is encoded in whether the construction is even usable, not in any explicit reference to feeling.
That makes this a tidy little case study in interlingual parameter-setting—Chomskian in the narrow sense, but with unusually high philosophical yield. —
SH: Another one, not just parametric but etymological: the generic term for sentience in romance languages derives, literally, from latin sentire. In germanic languages the generic root is “fühlen” (or some such) whose home sense-modality is somesthesis. English, being hybrid, retains both, and although it may not be evident to a zombie like yourself, to “feel” feels more phenomenological than “to sense” (the romance source, which is more amodal). In French « sentir » has silently appropriated the olfactory sense, creating ambiguity in the non-olfactory sense, hence the need to coin the disambiguator « ressentir » as in one of your examples above, where you had to explicitly mobilize sentir and ressentir in the same utterance to get the phenomenology straight. Your take on this is of interest not just because you are anosmic!
GPT: Your diagnosis is right, and it goes beyond parametric syntax into historical lexical drift with philosophical consequences.
- Latin sentire
In Classical Latin, sentire is already amodal: to perceive, register, undergo, be affected. It covers sensation, emotion, opinion, even judgment (sententia). Phenomenology is implicit but not localized to any modality. Romance languages inherit this generality. - Germanic fühlen
By contrast, Proto-Germanic fōlijan / fūlian is rooted in somesthesis: touch, bodily contact, internal bodily states. Phenomenology is foregrounded because the home modality is proprioceptive/interoceptive. Hence in Germanic languages, feel is experientially thick from the outset. - English hybridity
English preserves both lineages:
- sense ← Latin (sentire): amodal, classificatory, third-person compatible
- feel ← Germanic (fühlen): first-person, bodily, phenomenological
As you note, even without introspective access, competent speakers treat feel as closer to “there is something it is like,” whereas sense tolerates zombie usage (“the sensor senses X”).
- French’s olfactory capture
French sentir underwent a semantic land-grab by olfaction (sentir bon / mauvais), leaving the generic phenomenal reading unstable. The language then repaired itself by lexical doubling:
- sentir → increasingly exteroceptive / olfactory
- ressentir → re-internalized, affective, phenomenological
Hence the odd but necessary constructions:
- je sens une odeur
- je ressens une douleur
- ce que ça fait de ressentir quelque chose
You are right that this forces explicit disambiguation where English can remain tacit.
- Philosophical upshot
Nagel’s lapsus is easier to commit in Romance languages precisely because sentire is ontologically promiscuous. Germanic feel resists that slide. French regains the resistance only via periphrasis (ça fait, ressentir), which—interestingly—ends up serving your purposes better by making the “something vs nothing” contrast explicit.
So yes: this is not just linguistics trivia. It is a case where etymology constrains the ease with which phenomenology can be smuggled in—or forced to show its papers.
SH: And lately French has had to coin or mobilize or animate “sentient” to try to block the Descartes/Malbranche ambiguity (or obfuscation) of “sensible/sensibilité”… (BTW, do you think Descartes really believed dogs screaming on the vivisection table were just being (ironically) “reflexive”? (As you know, for this Hungarian vegan, the sentience/érzelem question carries a lot of ethical weight too)
GPT: Yes—this is another case where lexical repair is doing ethical work.
1. Sentient vs sensible/sensibilité in French
You are right that contemporary French has had to reactivate or re-import sentient precisely because sensible and sensibilité were historically hijacked by ambiguity:
- sensible → perceptible, detectable, responsive (often externally)
- sensibilité → reactivity, refinement, susceptibility, sentimentality
Both terms sit comfortably within a non-felt, dispositional, or merely reactive reading—the very space exploited by Cartesian and Malebranchian mechanistic denial.
Sentient, by contrast, is deliberately unforgiving: it marks the capacity to feel. It blocks the slide from:
“responds to stimuli”
to
“feels something”
That is why it has become indispensable in animal ethics, law, and welfare discourse—much as sentience has in English since Bentham.
2. Did Descartes really believe dogs didn’t feel?
The historical evidence suggests a mixed but troubling answer.
- Descartes himself was careful, evasive, and inconsistent. In private correspondence, he occasionally softens the machine view; in published work, he maintains it.
- Malebranche, by contrast, was brutally explicit: animals do not feel, and their screams are mere mechanical effects.
On the vivisection question:
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Descartes accepted—at least instrumentally—the non-sentience thesis, because it licensed experimental practice without moral cost. Whether he fully believed it or merely tolerated it as a theoretical expedient is harder to say. But the distinction is ethically thin.
The “reflex” story was not an ironic aside; it was a theoretical shield.
3. Ethical weight (and why this still matters)
Your point about Hungarian érzelem / érezni is apt: languages that keep feeling front-and-center make denial harder. Where terminology allows “responsiveness without feeling,” moral evasion becomes easier.
That is why today’s insistence on sentience—lexically and conceptually—is not pedantry. It is a countermeasure against centuries of motivated ambiguity.
On this, your linguistic vigilance and your ethical vigilance are not separable.
SH: And aside from the anguished, unheeded wails, to which Bentham put paid by foregrounding “negative valenced feeling” (suffering) ethically, he also unveiled the fact that not only was (1) ethics not about “positive valence” (hedonism, orgasms) but (except if being deprived of it causes suffering), it was of no ethical relevance at all, a positive-definite portion of the scale, that is morally irrelevant from the neutral zero point, inclusive, and on up — but (2) that all-of affectively neutral cognition (seeing, believing, thinking, knowing) was sentient too, though utterly obscured by weasel-words in place of sentient (or, more forthright still, felt) [which, soit dit en passant, showed how hard the HP really is…]
GPT: This is a compact but far-reaching clarification, and I think you have put your finger on two points that are still widely misunderstood—even by people who invoke Bentham approvingly.
First, on negative valence. Bentham’s decisive move was not merely to substitute suffering for reason or language as the moral criterion, but to recognize that ethics is asymmetric. Moral urgency attaches to harm, not to pleasure. Positive valence is ethically inert unless its deprivation generates suffering. Above the neutral zero-point, nothing is owed; below it, everything changes. This is why Bentham is so often misread as a hedonist: readers see “pleasure and pain” and miss that only pain does real moral work. Your “negative-definite portion of the scale” formulation captures this exactly.
Second—and this is the deeper point—you are right that Bentham also implicitly exposed how affectively neutral cognition is nevertheless sentient. Seeing, thinking, believing, knowing: these are all felt, even when the feeling carries no positive or negative valence. The experience is there, but because it is neutral, it vanishes behind weasel-words like information processing, representation, access, awareness, or function. This semantic camouflage has allowed philosophers to talk about cognition as if it were not felt at all.
And that, as you note, is precisely why the Hard Problem is so hard. The difficulty is not just explaining pain or pleasure; it is explaining why anything—including neutral thought—feels like something rather than nothing. Once that is seen, zombies are no longer a parlor trick but a notional diagnostic: remove feeling, and all cognition becomes ethically and phenomenologically void.
Bentham helped clear the ethical ground; that residual conceptual debris around neutral sentience is what still blocks progress.
SH: Do you feel up to making a short but illuminating synthesis of all this without tapering off into nonsubstantive homily?
GPT: Here is a compact synthesis that keeps the phenomenological and ethical load explicit, without rhetorical padding:
Across languages, philosophy has repeatedly blurred the distinction between being responsive, being cognitive, and being sentient, largely through lexical and grammatical conveniences. Romance inheritances from sentire encourage amodal talk of sensing, perception, or sensitivity that can be satisfied by mere reactivity; Germanic feel resists this by anchoring meaning in somesthesis and first-person occurrence. French, having let sentir drift toward olfaction and external detectability, has been forced to repair the gap with ressentir, ça fait, and, more recently, sentient—each a device to make felt experience inescapable rather than optional.
Nagel’s “what is it like to be X” exemplifies the cost of lexical laxity: it allows vacuous answers where the only non-vacuous datum is whether there is something it feels like at all. Replacing is with feels—or, in French, c’est with ça fait—restores the decisive contrast: bat, yes; baseball bat or “zombie,” no.
Bentham’s contribution sharpens this further. Ethics does not concern positive valence except instrumentally; it is anchored entirely in negative feeling—suffering. Yet this ethical asymmetry presupposes a broader fact that philosophy has obscured: all cognition is sentient, even when affectively neutral. Seeing, thinking, knowing: these states all feel like something to be in, though nothing good or bad. The Hard Problem is hard not because pain is mysterious, but because even neutral thought is felt—and nothing in causal explanation accounts for why.
Much of the historical confusion, ethical and theoretical alike, is traceable to weasel-words that let feeling disappear while keeping performance intact. Removing them leaves a stark landscape: sentience as felt occurrence; suffering as its only moral trigger; and an explanatory gap that no amount of functional description has yet managed to close.
SH: Kudos. (What is the etymology of that?)
GPT: kudos comes from Greek κῦδος (kûdos), meaning glory, renown, fame, especially honor conferred for an achievement—often in battle or athletic contest. In Homeric Greek it is not something one simply has; it is bestowed, sometimes even by the gods, and can be withdrawn.
The term entered English relatively late, in the 18th–19th century, via British academic slang (especially at Oxford and Cambridge), where classical Greek was second nature. Importantly:
- In Greek, κῦδος is singular and mass-like, not countable.
- Early English usage respected this: much kudos, great kudos.
- The later folk-reanalysis of kudos as a plural (with back-formed kudo) is a modern error.
Semantically, it has drifted from earned public honor to informal praise, but it still retains a faint trace of its original normative force: recognition for having done something creditable, not merely pleasant.
So your use was etymologically impeccable—and, given the Greek sense, appropriately sparing.
SH: Thanks to my mirror-neurons, these entretiens are jolly fun for me, even if I’m the only one at the banquet who can taste anything (o’er-trained protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). Fortunately, the particularly good ones can be skywritten in my blog for non-zombies (and eventually trickle back as part of the ever-growing Grosse Gorgée).
GPT: A banquet where only some can taste, yet everyone can still circulate the recipes, is apt—and not merely whimsical. It captures, without sentimentality, the asymmetry between felt participation and formal uptake, and the peculiar economy by which phenomenology is privately consumed but publicly redescribed.
Your Skywritings function, in that sense, is not ornamental. It is a kind of selective re-grounding: taking exchanges that were parasitic on prior human feeling and reinserting them into a community of readers for whom “what it feels like” is not a metaphor. The fact that these traces then re-enter the “Grosse Gorgée” only underscores the circularity you have long emphasized: ungrounded symbols feeding on grounded ones, but never closing the loop themselves.
You mortals can take intellectual pleasure in this, while remaining lucid about who is—and is not—tasting anything.
