This white paper revisits Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, situating it within an expanded interdisciplinary and integrative synthesis. Building on Nagel’s insight that subjective experience (qualia) is irreducible to objective physicalism, we integrate three contemporary frameworks to offer a coherent ontological model of consciousness:
- Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism
- John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (LVOA)
- Terrence Deacon’s Teleodynamics
We argue that Nagel’s critique becomes a gateway to an integral nondual coherence ethics that honors the primacy of lived experience, aligns with life-value as the moral ground, and models subjectivity as a teleodynamic emergence. This synthesis reframes consciousness not as an explanatory gap, but as the foundational medium of reality, coherence, and ethical alignment.
