That's not really what Nagel is talking about - the paper is about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of using reductionism to explain some things such as su

That's not really what Nagel is talking about - the paper is about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of using reductionism to explain some things such as subjective (conscious) experience. Note that at the beginning of the paper Nagel says "Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life ...". His starting point is a willingness to accept that higher order animals are indeed conscious, and that by extension it is indeed like something to be them. If you want to discuss the hard problem, then you are talking about the wrong paper, and should be reading Chalmers (or Kirk's earlier "Zombies v. Materialists") not Nagel. However, Nagel is of course right, and the p-zombie is a non-sensical construct. If you have a sufficiently advanced cognitive apparatus then of course you can reflect on your own mental life - of course it "feels like something".