Word.ws English Dictionary

what-it's-like-ness

what-it's-like-ness noun: the qualitative character of consciousness.

Noun

what-it's-like-ness (uncountable)

  1. The qualitative character of consciousness.
    • Thomas Nagel brought into contemporary debates the notion of what-it's-like-ness by claiming that in order to understand an entity as conscious, there must be something that it is like to be that thing. There is nothing that it's like to be a bat, he said, it's not possible for us to imagine what...2012, Paul S. MacDonald, Languages of Intentionality, page 217
    • At the what-it's-like-ness end of the semantic range of the word 'experience', we have something that I might also call 'consciousness' — if that helps: […]2022, Sophie Grace Chappell, Epiphanies: An Ethics of Experience, page 158

Origin of what-it's-like-ness

From what + it's + like + -ness.

Questions about what-it's-like-ness

What does what-it's-like-ness mean?
What-it's-like-ness means the qualitative character of consciousness.
What part of speech is what-it's-like-ness?
What-it's-like-ness is a noun.

Words near what-it's-like-ness in the dictionary

  1. what-if
  2. what-iffed
  3. what-iffery
  4. what-iffing
  5. what-ifs
  6. what-it's-like-ness
  7. what-it's-likeness
  8. what-like
  9. what-not
  10. what-not shop
  11. what-not shops

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: what-it's-like-ness (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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