Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False

by Thomas Nagel

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.

Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.

In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

Features
- Author is a renowned philosopher
- Makes a controversial argument
- Engages in the heated contemporary debate over whether materialism and neo-Darwinism can explain the mind-body problem

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Evolution, Psychology, Religion, Biology

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor and Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. He is well-known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings.

Thomas Nagel was born to a Jewish family in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil from Oxford University in 1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls. Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from 1966 to 1980), where he trained many well-known philosophers including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, who is now his colleague at NYU. In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Nagel is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2008, he was awarded a Rolf Schock Prize for his work in philosophy, the Balzan prize, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford University.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had trouble at first making sense of this controversial book, but after a while I thought of my autistic son Jonathan and it all came into focus. Jonathan has a number of behavioral patterns which make life difficult for him, and the worst of them is his love of Making People Angry. As he explains in his disarmingly candid way, Making People Angry Is Fun. Ideally, the people being made angry should be attractive women; these are described as "Sweet And Pretty" if they are under 30, or "Beautiful And Exciting" if they are older than the cutoff date. (As you can see, Jonathan is ageist, but chivalrously so). Possibly under the influence of watching too many Elvis Presley movies - he is a huge fan - Jonathan sometimes hopes, as a result of being Made Angry, that the Sweet And Pretty women will Lie Down In His Lap. It has never become clear what this would involve, since Jonathan's carers, particularly the Sweet and Pretty ones, have made it clear that Making People Angry is Inappropriate, and resolutely refuse even to talk about the possibility of any Lying Down In Laps. But Jonathan continues to hope.

And so to Mind and Cosmos. I am afraid that Thomas Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who definitely should know better, also seems to be rather fond of Making People Angry. Here, he says a number of very Inappropriate things. He casts doubt on the validity of Neo-Darwinian evolution as an explanatory mechanism for the development of the mental faculties we observe in the higher species, and in particular in humans. He states that there is no reason to believe that life arose on Earth as a result of natural physical and chemical processes, and impudently quotes authorities like Crick and Monod as supporting his position. He dismisses the notion of a multiverse in two sentences, which, to provide added sting, he puts in a footnote. He argues that moral judgments have objective validity, which humans are somehow capable of directly perceiving. Worst of all, he repeatedly uses the T-word: if you have not come across it, this word starts with a T and ends in "eleology", and it is a very Inappropriate word indeed. I strongly advise you not to use it yourself.

I can only guess why Professor Nagel has been behaving so Inappropriately, but I note that he repeatedly mentions the many interesting discussions he has had with Professor Sharon Street of New York University. Professor Street has published several articles on evolutionary theory and its implications for theories of morality, from which Nagel quotes at length. Her position here is very different from Nagel's, and I can well believe that some of his claims could have left her feeling a little Angry. Looking at her picture, it does not seem out of the question that an elderly male academic might consider her Beautiful and Exciting, or perhaps even Sweet and Pretty.



One hopes that Professor Nagel is already behaving more Appropriately, in which case my advice will be superfluous. If not, I would recommend that he spends less time with the personable Professor Street, who seems to have an Unsettling Influence, and reads less Aristotle. Possibly he would also find it therapeutic to write a sequel to his very popular article on the philosophy of being a bat.

I ought to charge for this kind of thing.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

There Is Another Way

Is the self-aware, socially-oriented, language-using, persistently interpretive faculty that we call the human mind a product of the evolution of random chemical, biological and quantum physical processes, or is it the result of an act of a divine being? This is the intellectual choice as it is presented in popular debate: religion or science. But suppose that neither religion nor science can account for the facts as we known them. Suppose that the intransigence of the human mind to explanation by psychophysical reduction or by ‘intelligent design’ are both fundamentally defective. Is there a reasonable alternative programme of investigation?

Thomas Nagel believes that there is. And he makes a good case. Nagel, who is an eminent philosopher of science considers that religious opposition to reductionist science has done human thought a service by correctly identifying flaws in current scientific arguments which would be unrecognised without that opposition. It appears, in Nagel’s view, that religious belief is provoking a new kind of Enlightenment, an exposure of the pretensions and contradictions of a dominant but inadequate mode of thinking. Whether he us right or not is far less interesting to me than the novelty of the argument. It is both refreshing and revealing.

The premise of Nagel’s approach is that what we call ‘mind’ is not an incidental by-product of the emergence and development of life but the central event of existence. That is to say that not just living things but all existing things are directed by purpose. This is called teleology and involves a very different analysis of the way the universe actually is, its ‘order’, than the standard categories of cause and effect. The teleological presumption is that the universe and all its components develop not like billiard balls bouncing off each other until they fall into a pocket but like the human imagination which continuously explores, interprets and integrates itself with the cosmos.

Teleology is not a new idea. Aristotle considered it an important method of analysis. But since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, teleology has been ignored as a general explanatory idea except in theological circles. Only by a few scientist-theologians has the teleological tradition been taken at all seriously. One of these, the Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, identified the creation of what he called the noösphere, the environment of the spirit, as the purposeful objective of cosmic development. For his innovative and elegantly beautiful thought he was, of course, shunned by his fellow scientists and condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church.

Teleology on the scale of the universe is not easy to keep separate from religious belief. It nevertheless does not imply a religious orientation. This is what got Teilhard into trouble with his ecclesiastical superiors (and long before him, Spinoza and Joachim of Flores among others). On the other hand the dominant conception, ideology really, of universal cause and effect is held by many scientists with what amounts to religious fervour. Nagel does a good job of navigating between the Scylla of fundamentalist doctrine and the Charybdis of scientistic ideology. It is a fascinating journey that any intelligent mind would benefit by taking. One can only hope that Nagel has a better reception than Teilhard among such minds.

[Jan Rice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure when and where I first heard of this book, but I do know it captured my attention when I read that the atheist evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker had linked to a negative book review of it with a tweet asking "What has gotten into Thomas Nagel" and announcing it had "exposed the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker," followed by Leon Wieseltier's counter-attack on Pinker. Apparently controversy broke through the ho-hum, and I sat up and took notice. The title of the book seemed to be a battle cry of sorts.

Some of what Wieseltier said:

I understand that nobody is going to burn Nagel’s book or ban it. These inquisitors are just more professors. But he is being denounced not merely for being wrong. He is being denounced also for being heretical. I thought heresy was heroic. I guess it is heroic only when it dissents from a doctrine with which I disagree. Actually, the defense of heresy has nothing to do with its content and everything to do with its right. Tolerance is not a refutation of heresy, but a retirement of the concept. I am not suggesting that there is anything outrageous about the criticism of Nagel’s theory of the explanatory limitations of Darwinism. He aimed to provoke and he provoked. His troublemaking book has sparked the most exciting disputation in many years, because no question is more primary than the question of whether materialism (which Nagel defines as “the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real”) is true or false.

My attention gained, I began to read. It became a read-out-loud-at-dinner book, which was a very good thing since the book proved difficult to take in at many points. It is a good book to pursue with a study partner. Also, it is the first book I've read as an e-book. The disadvantage of that was that it was easier to get lost in the text. I considered buying a hard copy but used books weren't available yet, and the book just wasn't compelling enough to make me want to rush out and purchase it new. Techniques I used to avoid getting lost: underlining, Goodreads quotes and updates, and the always-useful rereading.

An e-book advantage was that my husband and I are both on the same Kindle account, so we each had a copy in front of us.

Nagel did battle with scientific materialists over consciousness, reason, and value. A synonym for consciousness is "subjective point of view." Sort of, mind vs. brain. Reason is equivalent to cognition, or knowledge. Value is used interchangeably with motivation, or choice.

Consciousness as real in its own right rather than as emergent from brains (matter) is his foundation. I had issues with that. I was not at all sure he was conversant with all the research contributing to an understanding of consciousness as attention. In other words, we are "aware" of only that to which we are paying attention, while functioning on automatic pilot otherwise. I was sympathetic to Nagel's direction but found it overly based on his intuition, as in, "I think, therefore I am."

His argument regarding reason, that is, logic, was harder to refute. If something is logically the case, that seems to be a reality in its own right, not something that grew as mankind evolved. He used the example of traveling south and seeing the sun rise on one's right, and knowing that either one is not traveling south, or else the sun is setting, not rising. He seemed to be saying, though, that reason is in brains, while it seemed to me that it's the ability to use reason that develops, reason being a tool we discover. So it appears I'm reacting like a Platonist when it comes to logic.

Regarding reason, I also found myself reflecting that we often think we are using it but aren't; a study of rhetoric (i.e., Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama) shows what influences us, while cognitive psychology (i.e., Thinking, Fast and Slow) shows why. Thomas Nagel does give lip service, at least, to the limitations of reason, but, I thought, still had it on too high a pedestal.

The third leg of his case was value realism, the idea that values, like logic, exist on a plane of reality separate from human nature or psychology. That seems to entail a notion of values as universals, and that what is good and what is bad has always been there. Again, I think of some of my recent reading, for example, Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, or Robert Wright's The Evolution of God, and I just don't think so. Not all groups or cultures are aware of all the sorts of values, and those we don't consciously articulate tend to have an undue--and unacknowledged--influence. Meanwhile individuals are ascribing universality only to the values they do acknowledge.

And values evolve. For example, the understanding that it is a misuse of power for an older professor or teacher to seduce a student is a relatively new belief (or, maybe, discovery) that has occurred within my lifetime. (No, I don't think those were the issues with Abelard and Heloise; that was more about Abelard's intrusion on Heloise as her father's property.)

Arguably, even murder wasn't always wrong; that's one interpretation of the Cain and Abel story: humanity had developed to the point that, now, it is wrong.

At any rate, Nagel wants to pin the concrete beginnings of good and evil on pleasure and pain. Thus pleasure and pain have a "double nature"--not just evolution and survival but also the source of value. Unfortunately, that sounds to me as though it could lead to a good/evil dualism (and maybe the stylish charge of being Manichean?). He does relate good and evil to life itself, so why not just go with life as the value?

For Nagel, then, value could be the progenitor of life, rather than vice versa.

I am stating these arguments much too strongly, as Nagel mostly argues that materialism couldn't be true rather than that realism is true. That means his provocative title is something of a come-on. Michael Chorost, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, gets at that:

In short, Mind and Cosmos is not only negative but underpowered, as if Nagel had brought a knife to a shootout.

Michael Chorost observes, too, that there are scientists who agree with Nagel's conclusion that the laws of nature include a teleological component, that is, a direction, but Nagel ignores that in his portrayal of a set battle with science.

That article was useful for me as it was Michael Chorost's criticisms that emboldened me enough to make a few of my own.

I've benefited from the time, energy, and thought I put into this book (which included reading his What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy as well), but am not convinced that reading the works of philosophers is the best use of my energy. It's their premises. Although they may apply logic to their premises, their choice of premises often doesn't seem all that logical. For example:

Nobody's perfect;
I'm nobody;
ergo I'm perfect.

Jokes aside, philosophers' choices of the questions sometimes do seem geared to further their preferred conclusions. In other words, I'm saying that philosophers aren't necessarily free of confirmatory as opposed to exploratory thinking--the latter being thinking that seeks the truth.

I know I still need to learn what the great philosophers have thought, but trusted secondary sources may be the best choice for me. Some of my friends will be disappointed in that, but I speak as someone who is no longer young and knows she doesn't have all the time in the world.

My favorite part of this book was his argument against the multiverse hypothesis. It was in a footnote:

Are there any alternatives? Well, there is the hypothesis that this universe is not unique, but that all possible universes exist, and we find ourselves, not surprisingly, in one that contains life. But that is a cop-out, which dispenses with the attempt to explain anything. And without the hypothesis of multiple universes, the observation that if life hadn't come into existence we wouldn't be here has no significance. One doesn't show that something doesn't require explanation by pointing out that it is a condition of one's existence. If I ask for an explanation of the fact that the air pressure in the transcontinental jet is close to that at sea level, it is no answer to point out that if it weren't, I'd be dead.

I see I've neglected any actual discussion of whether life could have come about just on the basis of scientific materialism. It seemed Nagel went into a lot of theorizing as to how that doesn't appear correct, but here is an argument based on the improbability. It's from an article by Alvin Plantinga.

But, someone will say, the improbable happens all the time. It is not at all improbable that something improbable should happen. Consider an example. You play a rubber of bridge involving, say, five deals. The probability that the cards should fall just as they do for those five deals is tiny—something like one out of ten to the 140th power. Still, they did. Right. It happened. The improbable does indeed happen. In any fair lottery, each ticket is unlikely to win; but it is certain that one of them will win, and so it is certain that something improbable will happen. But how is this relevant in the present context? In a fit of unbridled optimism, I claim that I will win the Nobel Prize in chemistry. You quite sensibly point out that this is extremely unlikely, given that I have never studied chemistry and know nothing about the subject. Could I defend my belief by pointing out that the improbable regularly happens? Of course not: you cannot sensibly hold a belief that is improbable with respect to all of your evidence.

Here is an article by Thomas Nagel that gives a flavor of his book, showing how his words can range from the abstruse to the sublime. As the reader can see, I found many quotable quotes in this book.

I almost forgot to mention that Thomas Nagel is an atheist. This book, then, leads back to all the discussion in connection with my short but provocative review of The Evolution of God. But, really, Nagel doesn't solve the problem of dualism to my satisfaction. It occurs to me that the difficulty is not in the nature of life, the universe, and everything, but, rather, in our difficulty thinking about them.

Also as he says at the end of that article,

Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy. I would add that even some theists might find this acceptable; since they could maintain that God is ultimately responsible for such an expanded natural order, as they believe he is for the laws of physics.

In other words, some theists might find their views consistent with the sort of teleology he espouses.

As for me, I don't believe in a teleology by which the acorn already knows what it's aiming for, that is, the oak tree. I believe in a teleology of *everything* that is sniffing its way along (sorry for the anthropomorphism, or worse) and choosing as it goes. I don't visualize an ending that is already written, but a process that everybody can be part of and that we're all needed for.

And, so, for a final link, here's Kazantzakis' The Saviors of God, which I found in full online.

I haven't even read the whole thing, but my husband once read a chunk of it out loud to me, and it made an impression. I think it's my theology, too, which I've also referred to as panentheism, and probably it's related to process theology--which I haven't learned anything about, yet. I know he gets to it via a different route, but the key is struggle.

A little more on the implications and significance of this book:
At the time of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a paradigm shift, or a paradigm flip, such that theology, which had been the "queen of the sciences," along with metaphysics, philosophy, and so forth, were dethroned, in favor of what we now consider the "hard sciences" and scientific empiricism. The new scientific orthodoxy said that what was internal and subjective was not important--in effect, not real. That's usually viewed as progress, from our vantage point. It's worth remembering that one reason for the paradigm shift in the West was all the mayhem wreaked by religious civil war in Europe in the 16th century and first half of the 17th. Thinkers didn't want the various Christian sects to have all that power to cause trouble. The nostalgia some theologians have for a time of greater religious influence, and the debate we have between science and religion today, apparently hasn't effected much change in the current paradigm. But as C.S. Lewis said, every new learning is a new ignorance. Scientific empiricism first said mind didn't exist and now tends to project out of its own narrative a diminished concept of mind. I think what Nagel has done is highlight that narrative and say it's not reality, it's just scientific empiricism seeing its own reflection. Also, he's sidestepped the realm of religion to stage his attack from within the atheist camp.

I still have a problem with his using consciousness as his own foundation, yet not taking into consideration new findings as to what consciousness is. He himself has said that scientific results stand, even if scientists have incorrectly interpreted what they mean, so it seems to me he needed to struggle with those findings, not just start with terms that ignore them.

Update Sept. 3, 2013: Steven Pinker's Aug. 6, 2013 "Science Is Not Your Enemy, A Plea for an Intellectual Truce" (from The New Republic, issue of Aug. 19)

This review began with Steven Pinker's controversial tweet; I've waited until I finished Mind and Cosmos before reading his Aug. 6 essay, which, while not a specific response to this book, is a general response to, really, all criticisms of science's role as the epitome of knowledge.

I've seen Pinker quoted all over the place, from The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion to Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, and one of his books, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, is on my to-read list. I accorded one of his fellow evolutionary psychologists, Daniel Kahneman, life-changing impact, and give plenty of credit to Jonathan Haidt, too. But I'm not impressed by this article.

The title sounded conciliatory, but the article is full of nasty characterizations; Pinker never misses an opportunity for a jab at those with whom he disagrees.

It's either his way or the highway. Religion is either fundamentalist, for which he presents the usual straw men, or it's what he thinks it should be: secular humanist.

Science is the victim of unfair attacks on all sides by the humanities, who resist letting science improve them. Forget the War on Christmas; this is the war on science.

There is only one way to knowledge, and that is through empiricism. Or sort of...

Pinker begins his article by holding up the Enlightenment thinkers, Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, and Smith, as great scientists all, even though they lacked empirical data. Yet, now, anyone who shortcuts empiricism is a phony pretender to knowledge.

Sounds to me like revelation occurred during the Enlightenment and now there is to be no more revelation; the canon is closed. That sounds suspiciously like a religion.

I don't think Pinker can see that it's the epistemology that's being questioned--how we know and the validity and foundation of knowledge. I don't think he can get his head far enough out of the water of his faith in science to get his bearings.

He sees himself as having all the answers but is just leading us into more polarization.

He lists all the dead ends that pass for knowledge--faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom (and) the invigorating glow of subjective certainty--as though through science we can perfect ourselves into perfectly logical, perfectly reasonable beings without those areas of fallibility. It doesn't occur to him that one of those lacuna could have swallowed him up.

He comes across as insecure, with the best defense a good offense.

What's the good of knowing all the evolutionary psychology he knows if all he can do is flail around and call names? That's what I loved about Thinking, Fast and Slow; Kahneman did use what he knows to show the reader.

It's a pity, because Pinker does know a lot. "The invigorating glow of subjective certainty" as the very personification of error--that's so perfect.

But what good is all that knowledge if you can just yell at the blind, not make them see?

Update Sept. 5, 2013: Here is the link to Adam Gopnick's article "Mindless, the New Neuro-Skeptics," in the new New Yorker on a closely related topic.

[Justin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Embarrassing. There's no other fitting word to describe the argument put forth in this book by Thomas Nagel, one of the world's greatest living philosophers.

Nagel's argument relies on the premise--through inference--that there is a pervasive, immutable morality that characterizes the universe. What evidence is there for this? Well, as it turns out, the evidence is his intuition. Based on this intuition, Nagel concludes that the Universe is not the cold, materialistic, relativistic entity that modern science accepts as a working, tested model; indeed, Nagel concludes that the Universe is teleological, in other words, that it is moving towards a goal, an implicitly positive, better reality than each that has preceded it. In this, he rather rashly echoes the least compelling features of Hegel and Marx.

Nagel reiterates time and again in this book that he is not attempting to subvert, nor rewrite, the laws of science. Rather, he claims to be on a purely philosophical enquiry, the empirical nature of which has led him to the conclusion that Darwin is wrong because organisms have gotten, on average, more complex over time. Of course, if one starts from zero complexity, towards what other direction than "more complex" could organisms go? In treading frightfully close to discredited Creationist twaddle, Nagel is concluding that the foundations of science, which operates on the testing of hypotheses and controlled experimentation, are not applicable when it comes to the observable universe.

A bizarre, ill-considered, and intellectually perverse book by an otherwise brilliant philosopher.

[Blaine Snow · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's hard to believe the fuss that's being made over this book. It's even harder to believe how a major thinker can present his views on what is arguably the central problem of the western worldview and exclude so much work that has been done towards addressing that problem. Is it an academic turf thing or is it just that he's unaware of these advancements? Nagel takes on the age-old mind/body problem--how to reconcile materialistic science with the world of mind and consciousness--and does so with courage and creativity. Ultimately however, he does everyone a great disservice by overlooking the advancements in mind/body science that have accumulated over the past three or four decades. The revolution in our worldview that Nagel argues for in Mind and Cosmos is a revolution that has been going on for decades, and has unfolded over the years in the form of various postmodern critiques of modernity and its views of materialism, reductionism, and determinism.

The best place to look for these revolutions and their approaches to the problems Nagel addresses in this book are embodied mind cognitive science (embodied cognition) and complex systems theory (also self-organizing systems, self-adaptive systems, and autopoiesis). Both are labels for massively interdisciplinary endeavors that are being pursued by philosophers, linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists. The embodied mind approach in cognitive science is barely two decades old but recently it has been gaining mainstream attention because people are realizing that it points a path toward the kind of reconciliation Nagel argues for. Here is a very partial list of volumes in these two interdisciplinary fields that have come out in the last 10-20 years that contain tons of new insights and perspectives that depart from the kind of materialistic naturalism that Nagel so rightly criticizes:

1. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind
2. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness
3. The End of Certainty
4. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
5. Embodied Cognition
6. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
7. Tree of Knowledge
9. From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition
10. Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory
11. [Also see my Embodied Cognition book list here on GoodReads]

Another reviewer also pointed out that Nagel overlooks developments in epigenetics and the advancements in neuroscience that continue to add to our overall picture of how the mind and the body interact. Although Nagel brings in the possibility of a natural teleology as an avenue for reconciliation, he doesn't address the overall problem of time and irreversibility in the natural sciences, particularly in physics, a problem that is at the heart of the materialistic worldview. Two works which do address thermodynamic time head on are the important work of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers on thermodynamic irreversibility done in the 1980s and 90s in Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature and more recently, the excellent book by Eric Schneider and Dorian Sagan Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life).

Of course Nagel is a philosopher and so makes a fine philosophical statement. Unfortunately that's not enough in today's interconnected world. Today's intellectuals have to be interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. I hope Nagel's book interests you enough to delve into the works (above) and see for yourself the exciting new roads people have been traveling towards resolving the mind/body problem.

Edited on 2-14-19 (took out the reference to Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn because I was mistaken: it does not further the move towards a postmodern physics of uncertainty, instability, indeterminism, chance, chaos, and time as irreversibility.

[Evan Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much maligned in reviews, misrepresented for the most part. I'm inclined to think the negative response was more indicative of dogma than of shoddy reasoning on Nagel's part.

[Whitley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short but deep book, well worth a careful, thoughtful read. It offers a convincing and sophisticated argument that consciousness is explained neither as a side-effect of brain activity nor as a product of intelligent design, but rather that it probably exists both within and without the body. The exploration of this important idea is very cogent and the logic sterling.

I found this extremely exciting, because the author's intellectual observations mirror my own empirical experience of nonphysical life, which are so extensive that, at this point, they are a much richer part of my life than conventional existence, as rich as that is. However, he does not draw the same conclusions as I do, not by any means. He ends with an elegant and frankly very exciting argument that a new vision of reality is essential to the human future.

I could not agree more, and I urge the reading of this book!

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nagel and his other secularist friends sat down at table in the middle of a sunlit field. Their eyes were closed tight, but they supposed that they were open and imagined that the cakes of sand they were feasting upon were a steak dinner.

Then Nagel stood up as a blind prophet among a blind people and said, "Hey bros, something ain't right here. I'm pretty sure we're still in the dark." Then Nagel stood up and rather than opening his eyes, began blundering around in the grassy field looking for a light switch. As he stumbled about, he waxed eloquent about what the light switch might look like, and what kind of wall it might be built into.

His friends scoffed at him, insisting that they didn't need a light switch. After all, they could already see everything. The natives, on the other hand, suggested that he open his eyes. After all, then he could see where he was going. Nagel remained unconvinced by either, and continued his search. Eventually, he grew tired, sat down, and, right before he fell asleep, told everyone that while he couldn't be sure that the light switch existed, he was sure that the search for it was worthwhile.

[Marvin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book since my philosophy book group picked it. I couldn't find a copy in a local library so bought the eBook edition. After 2 pages I wanted my money back. This is by far the worst book I have read for that group in the 10 years I have been attending monthly meetings.

Nagel makes so many glaring and probably false assumptions I am sure I will miss some here:

1. First, reductionist science is false since it can't explain evolution. Why can't it? -- since Nagel can't think of why natural selection works and science should (his words) follow common sense.

2. He then views consciousness as the end product of evolution. Why is that? He makes the same creationist argument that natural selection (i.e. evolution) has a purpose and he doesn't see how random mutations give us consciousness. But this is a mistaken belief. Rerun evolution and you may not get consciousness. I can think of several evolutionary biological reasons of why consciousness is a desirable trait that can follow from simple stimulus-response organisms. The problem here is we only have one instance (the earth) of life, so it is hard to say that what life looks like here is what life MUST look like.

3. He then applies the creationist's favorite "god of the gaps" argument. "If I can't think of a reason, then god did it." Perhaps he just isn't smart enough. Perhaps the answer will be discovered next Tuesday. We can't assume that since a philosopher cannot think of why, then it must be false. He says he is an atheist, but he leans heavily on his "fact" that the universe has a purpose.

4. He then goes on to state that there is a purpose to all this and "reason" is an ultimate goal. Why? He uses as an example that "fairness" is a principle we all agree to. What about "equality?" These can be mutually disjoint, and good people can believe in one or the other. There is no right answer to this.

I could go on, but this is enough. The book has little to offer. Save your money.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not sure what I can add to a review of this book that has not been said before. I found his honesty refreshing. Though he has been a staunch materialistic atheist, he is honest enough to admit that certain features of the universe do not sit will with materialism, and are unlikely to ever be explained in materialistic terms. For things like qualia, there seems to be an uncrossable ditch between materialism and explanation.

Unlike most materialists, Nagel does not go down the road of reductionism. He truly seems to 'get' the problem for materialism regarding these several features. Unfortunately, his approach is to propose that the universe has a non-material, teleological aspect somewhat prior to its material component. This is just bizarre. This sort of Platonic understanding has its own intractable problems and doesn't advance the materialist explanatory power enough to pay the price demanded by its ontic import.

Theism has much greater explanatory scope and power, and resolves the issues Nagel struggles to comprehend for the same increase to the materialist ontology. His shallow dismissal of theistic arguments is unbecoming. One cannot help but wonder if Nagel has let his, openly admitted, desire to avoid theism obscure his keen intellect when he ponders the resolution to his conundrum.

I recommend this book to materialists who are committed to seeking true understanding. Nagel is not a lightweight - and the problems he admits for materialism are very real. The book is approachable for someone with only a basic level of philosophical understanding, yet rewarding for those who are already familiar with the debate on these matters.

[Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some philosophical works are valuable because of the problems they formulate and because they pose the questions that really matter with greater precision than we're used to, even though their approach to those problems and questions leaves much to be desired by way of argumentative rigor. Nagel's work here is of that sort, I think. He himself has the humility and self-awareness to explicitly recognize this. I commend his effort to defend the value of doing this sort of problem-clarifying work in an intellectual milieu which has become a minefield of controversy and ideological turf-wars.

The thing is that, to my knowledge at least, there is still no consensus as to whether there is an explanatory gap, where the explanatory gap refers to the idea that we cannot in principle explain, without remainder, the structure of conscious experience by referring solely to data derived from even an ideally-completed third-person, scientific account of mind (which we could arrive at by adding up the evidence from neuroscience, evolutionary theory, psychology, and cognitive science). Moreover, there is no consensus concerning just how much of an issue this explanatory gap really poses for scientific naturalism. Can scientific naturalism address it by making localized changes to its general conceptual framework? Or is the explanatory gap the critical anomaly that reveals that we need to rethink our general approach to explaining nature as a whole? Nagel (boldly) argues for the latter claim. Needless to say, that’s not going to win him many allies. The ideological climate in contemporary Analytic philosophy is such that I suspect that most readers are not likely to find his founding assumptions - never mind his overall conclusions - even remotely plausible.

Nagel argues that we need an account of the structure of nature that reveals how, given what we know about the fundamental constituents of the natural world, consciousness, rationality, value, meaning, and knowledge itself must necessarily arise as a result of natural processes. And yet, Nagel argues that current scientific naturalism can at best explain how these properties, like rationality, are merely accidental by-products of natural processes. Given how scientific naturalism explains both nature and mind, it seems unintelligible that rational minds should appear that are capable of responding to values and of disclosing the structure of nature through science. So, Nagel reasons that we need to rethink nature, as well as our dominant patterns of explanation, if we are to make sense of how nature could give rise to minds.

Moreover, he argues that rational self-understanding can reveal that moral and rational agency are essential features of the mind that any complete explanation must take into account. Thus, Nagel makes a very unpopular move here (again, one not likely to win him many fans in a scientistic intellectual climate), by arguing that it’s not just science that must inform philosophy, but also the other way around, such that our most rigorous philosophical self-understanding should constrain and guide scientific inquiry. A priori, rational, philosophical reflection can provide data that science must then seek to explain. Thus, by clarifying what he takes to be the proper target for explanation, Nagel thinks he can establish that our current scientific naturalist paradigm is set on a course that could never reach that target.

Most interestingly for me, he seems to argue that a key constraint on any explanation is that it should enable us to explain the possibility of explanation itself. What explains the explainer? What must nature be like if it is to make possible the emergence of an explanation of nature? How do you get meanings, values and rational structures out of brute facts about objects and their causal relations?

The key, initiating move in Nagel’s work is a very unpopular one, and one which primarily rationalists and idealists have made, historically: namely, it’s the move of starting metaphysical speculation with self-knowledge. The idea is that the adequacy of our current naturalist metaphysical theory, in general, can be measured in part by the extent to which it can explain the data revealed by a complete theory of human nature. In other words, for Nagel, the human mind is a corner of nature that exhibits rather bizarre and paradoxical properties - such as a responsiveness to objective values. Moreover, these properties cannot be explained as mere extensions and complexifications of the properties that other natural processes exhibit. And, if nature generated such strange abominations as we are, then our general theory of nature must surely include fundamental properties that don’t make it seem absurd that we exist. Our best philosophical account of the properties of human nature thus gives us enough reason to rethink the inventory of fundamental natural properties and principles.

Ultimately, Nagel argues that far from thinking of the explanatory gap as just a localized side-issue within a specialized sub-branch of philosophy (namely, philosophy of mind), we should instead recognize that the solution to this problem enjoins us to rethink nature itself. Thus, the problem of explaining consciousness and rationality is, for him, a symptom of a much more general deficiency in our entire understanding of what nature is. If he’s right, scientific naturalism lacks the conceptual and methodological resources required to explain what nature must be like if it is to generate beings capable of comprehending it. It lacks the resources to explain how it is that being can become intelligible to begin with. It also lacks the resources needed to explain what nature must be like if it is to be a bearer of value. It’s thus a view fundamentally incapable of adequate philosophical self-understanding.

Unsurprisingly, if you are suspicious of Nagel’s founding argumentative move - namely, of starting with self-knowledge/philosophical anthropology, and trying to use that to identify constraints for your general theory of being - you’re unlikely to think much of Nagel’s overall conclusion.

So maybe we need an enriched, teleological account of causation, Nagel argues. That might solve the multi-headed explanatory gap described above. A Neo-Aristotelian picture of nature, which recognizes not just mechanical causation but also teleological causes (and so can presumably ground values in the causal structure of the natural process), might save us and solve the problem of explaining how nature can generate not just creatures capable of digestion and reproduction, but also creatures capable of knowledge, meaning, value, rationality, and consciousness.

There have been people who explored that sort of move: see Terrence Deacon’s work, Incomplete Nature, which argues that what we ultimately need to do in order to close the explanatory gap and explain the place of mind and value in nature is to explain how a teleological level of causality, at the level of mind and life, can emerge out of mere mechanical causality at the level of fundamental physics. Deacon provides a much more sophisticated argument than Nagel does, and he ultimately shows just how much argumentative work we’d need in order to explore the overlooked teleological alternative rather crudely sketched in Nagel’s work here. Hence, it is all the more surprising that Nagel doesn’t engage with his work.

However, I have my doubts that by “going teleological” we’ll solve the explanatory gap that Nagel says we still haven’t solved (for all our complacent efforts to find ways to safely ignore it, or define it away - see the heroic efforts of Dan Dennett and the Churchlands for a shining example of that strategy). And this brings me to another notable omission of Nagel: he makes no mention at all of the entire post-Kantian tradition’s sustained critiques of scientific naturalism. Philosophers like Kant, Cassirer, and Husserl have long since argued that reason is not the kind of thing that you can explain by getting behind it, precisely because it is the ever-presupposed foundation that we stand on in making any intelligible knowledge claims about anything whatsoever.

To be fair, Nagel briefly touches on this line of argument in passing, in his section on “Cognition” There, he argues that any attempt to provide a naturalistic, evolutionary explanation of reason (e.g. by trying to ground the validity of rational inference by citing its reliability as a fitness-enhancing instrument in the lives of our ancestors) will inevitably presuppose, rather than explain, reason. Nagel argues that all explanation must bottom out in truths that we take to be evident in themselves. When we endeavour to explain reason “from outside,” like evolutionary accounts of rationality do, we simply presuppose the activity of reason which gives us access to self-evident truths. Nagel thus ultimately defends Descartes’ basic insight that reason, as the faculty that alone gives us immediate access to truths grasped as “valid in themselves”, is its own only possible arbiter, and can thus only be explained in its own terms, rather than being something we could explain from a third-person perspective that tries to ground it in external physical facts that we take to be more fundamental. In other words, by trying to explain reason naturalistically, we simply presuppose it in rendering the naturalistic explanation intelligible. Thus, reason cannot be explained naturalistically without circularity. I have a feeling that a lot of the readers of this work (judging by the reviews on here) simply missed the force of some of these more subtle and interesting arguments proposed by Nagel.

However, while Nagel touches on what to me seems to be the crux of the issue (i.e. why we have an explanatory gap at all to begin with), he doesn’t have the conceptual resources needed to fully explore possible solutions to the explanatory gap. This is where a dialogue between Analytic and Continental (esp. post-Kantian) philosophical traditions would be really helpful. Nagel, working on the explanatory gap by using primarily the resources of Analytic philosophy of mind, can barely hint at the general problem of constitution, as Kant, Cassirer, and Husserl called it - which is the problem of identifying the necessary conditions for the possibility of rendering objectivity as such intelligible to begin with. In my view, once you pose that problem - which scientific naturalism doesn’t even have the resources to pose, as Husserl argued in the Cartesian Meditations - you begin to fall down the endless rabbit hole that lets you fathom just how deep the explanatory gap really is, as well as understanding just how thorough-going a conceptual challenge it poses to our scientific naturalist worldview.

I suspect that a great deal of the (by now predictably) vitriolic response to this book is powered by the fact that, as a culture, we secretly suspect that all critiques that seek to expose the conceptual limits of naturalism are powered by hidden theological motives (despite the author's protestations to the contrary), or by a desire to protect some special, heart-warming, life-preserving personal fiction. Any line of argument that tries to reveal the in-principle conceptual limitations of this dominant pattern of explanation, such as Nagel explores here, has become anathema.

It is thus no longer surprising to me that Nagerl’s work has come under such attack for simply posing anew what is still, I think, the greatest challenge for scientific naturalism. He accurately identified the issues, and nicely explained why they’re issues. He also usefully showed how at the heart of this debate lie some deep-seated intuitions about what we're willing to take to be a basic truth. What do we take to be more fundamental? Do we have idealist intuitions, such that we think that physical facts aren’t self-explanatory, but that their intelligibility must instead be explained by reference to actual or possible experience? Or do we have physicalist intuitions, such that we think that experiential facts must be explained in terms of more fundamental physical (behavioural, evolutionary, neurophysiological) facts? Your basic intuitions about what you take the order of explanatory primacy to be here affects how you’ll approach the explanatory gap debate, and I am not sure that this fundamental theoretical decision can be determined through purely rational means (in this, my gut feeling seems borne out by the vitriolic pissing contest between these two sides, where both sides seem stuck attacking each other in the same rut, never gaining traction because at bottom the whole shitshow is a contest of competing intuitions).

I think that Nagel is right to suggest that you cannot adequately explain how consciousness can enable the rational disclosure of the world by just adding more of the same kind of epicyclical postulates to the inventory of the natural world, as conceived in the standard physicalist worldview. Accounting for how a chunk of the universe can turn itself back upon itself to take itself as an object of knowledge (and as subject to values that exist independently of it!) requires -something other- than adding in more of the same, and just filling in some blanks that are remaining here and there in an overall picture that is otherwise structurally sound.

Instead, I think that Nagel is right to argue that explaining this requires a creative (and heretical) rethinking of the pattern of explanation we’re all used to taking for granted. We’re so used to just mistaking this scientific naturalist picture with nature that we’ve forgotten the need to critique the limitations of this picture - and to remember that it really is just a revisable picture, whose SOLE value is its capacity to explain our experience - which, as Nagel points out, it is woefully inadequate at. How it is even possible for nature to become intelligible through the medium of experience seems, on this world picture, like an absurd little miracle.

Unfortunately, though, Nagel simply lacked the conceptual tools needed to do more than just pose the problem anew - albeit eloquently and fairly accurately, I think. I also think that the teleological move is probably a dead-end, particularly given the fact that that’s not the only option on the table (see the bit above about engaging with the post-Kantian tradition).

Ultimately, your intuitions, as a reader, about what counts as an answer to the following questions will determine whether you will take Nagel’s book to be a liberating breath of fresh air, a brave work exploring an overlooked (as well as repressed and much demonized) alternative in an increasingly dogmatic intellectual climate, or else a deluded crypto-theological, or at least crypto-dualist piece of tripe:

Can we know, through purely rational reflection and in advance of any experimental work, i) what the essential properties of our minds are, and ii) that these essential properties, like rationality, cannot be explicated without making reference to the first-person perspective that reveals us not merely as objects bound by causal relations, but rather as subjects of knowledge?

If your answer to both questions is yes, then Nagel’s argument will have some force for you. If the answer is no, then your foundational assumptions are likely to be so far skewed away from Nagel’s as to make his arguments seem to have hardly more than dishwatery consistency. You are unlikely to be persuaded by his argument that he has identified in-principle limitations for a scientific naturalist explanation of the place of consciousness, rationality, and value in the natural world. You’re going to leave open the possibility that by going down the same road it’s currently headed on - and by stacking up some exotic new species of fact - scientific naturalism in one of its myriad permutations will explain consciousness, rationality and value without remainder. If, in contrast, his in-principle arguments seem plausible, and you’re open to philosophical reflection informing our scientific self-understanding, you might at least find his line of argument interesting.

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es gilt heute als ausgemacht, dass es nur eine Frage der Zeit ist, bis die Wissenschaften auch Geist und Bewusstsein erklären werden können. Mit glasklarer Logik und Präzision zeigt Nagel überzeugend, dass unsere materialistische Weltsicht, Physik, Biologie und Evolutionstheorie daran aus prinzipiellen Gründen scheitern müssen.
Er versucht in der Folge auszuloten, welche Alternativen möglich sein könnten, bleibt dabei aber sehr theoretisch und spekulativ. Er neigt dazu, einer teleologischen Erklärung die besten Chancen einzuräumen, vielleicht eine Art Aristoteles 2.0 - und ist überzeugt davon, dass man sich in zwei, drei Generationen über unser heutiges Vertrauen in die materialistische Wissenschaft wundern wird. Wichtig zu sagen, dass Nagel sich von allen Formen theistischer oder anderer intentionalistischer, womöglich esoterischer Erklärungen ganz klar distanziert. Ein mutiges, zukunftsweisendes, aber auch schwieriges Buch.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is not so much about the flaws in the materialist and analytic worldview, as it is about their dogmatism and refusal to accept any critique. For example, despite systematic failures in defining/creating conscience and intelligence by top materialist and analytic scientists in the AI field, they have no doubt that their general theory is the Absolute Theory of Everything and “only missing a few pieces”. It is also symptomatic that one of the main AI approaches is to start with some basic program, to add enough variation and competitive selection, and then to wait for the conscience and intelligence to emerge according to the Darwinian theory.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, and will be reviewing it later on my blog. Nagel is an honest philosopher.

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

ENGLISH: I read this book in a Spanish translation, performed by a professor in Seville with whom I have collaborated several times.

The book provides a good number of convincing arguments for the assertion that materialist reductionism cannot explain conscience and reason without explaining it away. But as conscience is a hard element of our vision of the world, the conclusion should be that materialist reductionism is false.

Of course, this is not new. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (whom Nagel never mentions) offered an alternative to materialist reductionism in his first published book: The Phenomenon of Man (see the post in my blog: http://populscience.blogspot.com/2015...), where he asserted that mind is a fundamental component of the universe, together with matter, and every material being has some mental component, albeit vestigial. This position is quite similar to what Nagel calls "reductive constitutive explanation."

I have used arguments very similar to those offered by Nagel in a thread in my blog about human and artificial intelligence, made of about 20 posts, such as these: http://populscience.blogspot.com/2016... and http://populscience.blogspot.com/2018....

In chapter 2, Nagel describes theism as an alternative to materialist reductionism, and rejects it (not surprising, as he declares himself an atheist) because, according to him, neither materialist reductionism nor theism can provide a comprehensive description of the world: the first theory, because it leaves mental processes unexplained; the second, because it leaves God unexplained. Therefore, we must try to find a third middle way, which would leave nothing unexplained.

In this discussion, his starting premise is faulty: theism has never tried to provide a comprehensive view of the world, understood as everything that exists, for the defendants of this theory have always known that God is and will always be outside our capacity for explanation. The problem is, Nagel has mistaken the original aim of materialism (explaining everything) with the aim of every possible view of the world. It isn't, and it shouldn't be. When Nagel holds to this element, in spite of his rejection of materialist reductionism, he is just being infected by the influence of the same theory he is rejecting.

In fact, Nagel's position regarding theism (a frontal rejection) is unsupported, and finally reduces to this quotation of Lewontin in chapter 2: It is not that the methods and institutions of science force us in any way to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but rather that... we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of inquiry and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive it may be, no matter how mystical it may be to the uninitiated. What's more, this materialism is absolute because we cannot allow God to set his foot in the door. Nagel recognizes explicitly that his opposition to theism is not based on rational arguments, but on his own prejudice. "Not only I don't believe in God... I don't want God to exist!" he says in another book.

In other words: Nagel's rejection of the existence of God is not a consequence of his thought, but its explicit starting premise (an axiom). It's curious that the same person who accuses the advocates of materialist reductionism of starting on an unsupported premise against all arguments against it, falls in the same fault he is critizising when he is speaking about theism.

Actually Nagel falls in the fallacy I mentioned in this post in my blog: http://populscience.blogspot.com/2018.... If in a far future I were able to create intelligent beings in a simulated world, they could use Nagel's rejection of design to prove that I don't exist. Being reasonably convinced that I do exist, Nagel's position against theism loses all credibility.

In chapter 3, Nagel points that reason, which has been used to develop scientific theories such as evolutionary theory, cannot be explained by evolutionary theory, for thus we'd fall in circular reasoning. His arguments are quite similar to those used by C.S. Lewis in chapter 3 of his book "Miracles", developed by Victor Reppert and Alvin Plantinga. Nagel, however, never quotes Lewis or Reppert, although he does quote Plantinga.

Again Nagel rejects materialist reductionism, and as indicated before, he also rejects theism (without real arguments). He'd rather want a theory based on an intermediate position, where the universe would be teleological, but not intentional. The problem is, he doesn't know how to develop such a theory.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the idea of value (right or evil, true or false), or practical reason, or the capacity of election, or free-will. This is still more difficult to adapt to materialist reductionism. His arguments are not so different from those used by C.S. Lewis in "Mere Christianity", although Nagel does not cite Lewis, who uses them to defend theism. In fact, Nagel acknowledges that theism provides a valid explanation of this question, although he does not consider it. This argumentation is affected by the philosophical position one takes about moral realism or antirealism.

Further information in my blog: http://populscience.blogspot.com/2020...

ESPAÑOL: Leí este libro en una traducción al español, realizada por el profesor de Sevilla Francisco Rodríguez Valls, con el que he colaborado varias veces.

El libro proporciona muchos argumentos contundentes en apoyo de la afirmación de que el reduccionismo materialista no puede explicar la conciencia y otros elementos mentales sin eliminarlos. Pero como la conciencia es un elemento muy fuerte de nuestra visión del mundo, la conclusión debería ser que el reduccionismo materialista es falso.

Por supuesto, esto no es nuevo. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a quien Nagel nunca menciona) ofreció una alternativa al reduccionismo materialista en su primer libro publicado, El Fenómeno Humano (ver el artículo de mi blog: http://divulciencia.blogspot.com/2015...), donde afirmó que la mente es un componente fundamental del universo, junto con la materia, y todo ser material tiene algún componente mental, aunque sea vestigial. Esta teoría es muy semejante a la que Nagel llama "explicación constitutiva reductiva".

He utilizado argumentos similares a los ofrecidos por Nagel en un hilo de mi blog sobre inteligencia humana y artificial, compuesto por unos 20 artículos como estos: http://divulciencia.blogspot.com/2016... y http://divulciencia.blogspot.com/2018....

En el capítulo 2, Nagel describe el teísmo como una alternativa al reduccionismo materialista, y lo rechaza (lo que no es sorprendente, pues se declara ateo) porque, según él, ni el reduccionismo materialista ni el teísmo proporcionan una descripción completa del mundo: la primera teoría, porque deja sin explicar los procesos mentales; la segunda, porque deja sin explicar a Dios. Por tanto, debemos intentar encontrar un tercer camino intermedio, que no deje nada sin explicar.
En esta discusión, la premisa de partida es errónea: el teísmo nunca ha tratado de proporcionar una visión total del mundo, entendido como todo lo que existe, pues los defensores de esta teoría siempre han sabido que Dios está, y siempre estará, fuera del alcance de nuestra capacidad de explicación. El problema es que Nagel confunde el objetivo original del materialismo (explicarlo todo) con el objetivo de todas las visiones del mundo posibles. Ni lo es, ni debe serlo. Cuando Nagel se aferra a este elemento, a pesar de su rechazo del reduccionismo materialista, simplemente se está dejando infectar por la influencia de la misma teoría que rechaza.

De hecho, la posición de Nagel respecto al teísmo (rechazo frontal) es infundada, y en definitiva se reduce a su cita de Lewontin en el capítulo 2: No es que los métodos e instituciones de la ciencia nos obliguen de alguna manera a aceptar una explicación material del mundo fenoménico, sino que... estamos forzados por nuestra adherencia a priori a las causas materiales a crear un aparato de investigación y un conjunto de conceptos que produzcan explicaciones materiales, no importa qué contra-intuitivo pueda ser, no importa cómo de místico resulte a los no iniciados. Es más, ese materialismo es absoluto porque no podemos permitirnos que Dios ponga un pie en la puerta. Nagel reconoce explícitamente que su oposición al teísmo no se basa en argumentos racionales, sino en su propio prejuicio. "No es sólo que no creo en Dios... ¡Es que ansío que no exista ningún Dios!" dice en otro de sus libros.

En otras palabras: el rechazo de Nagel a la existencia de Dios no es una consecuencia de su pensamiento, sino su premisa inicial explícita (axioma). Es curioso que la misma persona que acusa a los defensores del reduccionismo materialista de partir de una premisa sin fundamento a pesar de los argumentos que hay en su contra, caiga en la misma falta que critica cuando habla del teísmo.

En realidad, Nagel cae en la falacia que mencioné en este artículo de mi blog: http://divulciencia.blogspot.com/2018.... Si en un futuro lejano llegara a haber seres inteligentes en uno de mis mundos simulados, ellos podrían usar la forma en que Nagel rechaza el diseño para demostrar que yo no existo. Puesto que estoy razonablemente convencido de que sí existo, la postura de Nagel contra el teísmo pierde toda credibilidad.

En el capítulo 3, Nagel señala que la razón, que hemos utilizado para desarrollar teorías científicas como la teoría de la evolución, no puede explicarse utilizando la teoría de la evolución, pues así caeríamos en circularidad. Sus argumentos son similares a los utilizados por C.S. Lewis en el capítulo 3 de su libro "Milagros", argumentos desarrollados por Victor Reppert y Alvin Plantinga. Nagel, sin embargo, nunca cita a Lewis o a Reppert, aunque sí cita a Plantinga.

De nuevo Nagel rechaza el reduccionismo materialista y, como se indicó anteriormente, también el teísmo (sin proponer verdaderos argumentos en este caso). Prefiere una teoría basada en una posición intermedia, en la que el universo sería teleológico, pero no intencional. El problema es que no sabe cómo desarrollar esa teoría.

El capítulo 4 está dedicado a la idea de los valores (lo bueno o lo malo, lo verdadero o lo falso), o la razón práctica, o la capacidad de elección, o el libre albedrío. Esto es aún más difícil de adaptar al reduccionismo materialista. Sus argumentos no son muy diferentes de los que utiliza C.S. Lewis en "Mero Cristianismo", aunque Nagel no cita a Lewis, que los usa para defender el teísmo. De hecho, Nagel reconoce que el teísmo proporciona una explicación válida de esta cuestión, aunque no la considera. Estos argumentos pueden verse afectados por la postura filosófica que se tome sobre el realismo o el antirrealismo moral.

Más información en mi blog: http://divulciencia.blogspot.com/2020...

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roughly two months ago, I happened upon a review of this book. Later that day, my upstairs neighbor, (a veteran epistemologist), expressed ideas that sounded remarkably reminiscent of what the review had stated about Nagel's thoughts on the mind-body question. I told him about Mind and Cosmos, and he was surprised to hear that Thomas Nagel held these views. Later that week he offered to buy the book for me if I would let him read it, and then read it myself. I enthusiastically accepted his offer.

Mind and Cosmos is primarily an exploration of the obstacles to finding an alternative world view to reductionist materialism, which is the idea that the development, existence, and operation of all that exists, including mental phenomenon, can be reduced to physical laws. Early on Nagel lays out a summary of the range of nuanced views within modern philosophy of mind, from materialist naturalism to anti-reductionism. He then gives a brief case for his anti-reductionism, and states his objective, "My aim is not to argue against reductionism, but rather to present the consequences of rejecting it; to present the problem rather than to propose a solution."

A quote from the second chapter, called "Anti-reductionism and the Natural Order", restates Nagel's objective: "If one doubts the reducibility of the mental to the physical, and likewise of all those other things that go with the mental, such as value and meaning, then there is some reason to doubt that a reductive materialism can apply even in biology, and therefore reason to doubt that materialism can give an adequate account even of the physical world. I want to explore the case for this breakdown, and to consider whether anything positive by way of a world view is imaginable in the wake of it."

To be clear, Nagel is an atheist, and not a proponent of intelligent design. From page 25, "Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one." Unlike so many "new atheists", though, he does not have a militant hostility or arrogant contempt towards theistic views, he just does not hold them himself. On a related note, he suspects that the reason the scientific community so generously assumes natural selection to "fill in the gaps" in understanding is because so many see it as the only available defense against theism.

The bulk of this work is Nagel's traversal of the realms of Consciousness (specifically, the experience of subjective mental phenomenon), Cognition (the ability to combine experience with reason to discern and grasp truths which transcend immediate sensory experience), and Value, which Nagel holds to be something objective and real. For each of these phenomena, he gives a brief explanation of and reasoning for his anti-reductionist view, and explores possible non-reductionist explanations of its constitutive properties (how does it work?), as well as of its historical development. He explores various "categories" of explanations, laying out the challenges each would have to overcome. For example: explanations in which physical particles have mental properties in addition to their physical ones are compared to emergent explanations, in which mental phenomena emerge from the functioning of complex physical systems). He sees some sorts of explanations as more comprehensible than others.

Ultimately, we discover that Nagel favors a universe which has teleological laws underlying it. He does not go into much detail regarding the form and content such laws would or could take, although he suggests that they could favor physical forms and patterns which maximize the number of possible future alternatives. This suggests a bi-directional causation of some sort.

The lack of elaboration on possible alternate world views left me a little unsatisfied at the end. To be fair, though, Nagel did provide fair warning in the opening chapters that he would not give much in the way of proposed new paradigms, but rather a case that we should be looking for them. Perhaps this lack of satisfaction is his goal, wanting to encourage further development from his audience.

Mind and Cosmos was my first dive into reading major work in the philosophy of mind. As a newcomer to the subject, some of the most interesting thoughts in Mind and Cosmos were those discussing how in science, we prefer the explanation which is simplest and requires the fewest arbitrary assumptions because we assume that the explanation which gives greater understanding is more likely to be true, just for that reason. Nagel believes this cozy relationship between the natural order and our cognitive capacities to be at odds with a reductive materialism. Much of his thought here was a further development of my own idle pondering over the years, stated much more lucidly than I ever had.

I rather enjoyed the read, as well as the many discussions with my neighbor, the retired philosophy professor, which both aided my understanding of the content, and provided a larger context for it. Nagel's arguments were powerful, his writing elegant, and he maintained a professional humility throughout.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nagel argues that Darwinian theory cannot explain consciousness. Without consciousness, his train of thought goes, we cannot apprehend moral truths; without these, we have no basis for determining right and wrong and no basis to control behavior. We are then left with just the evolutionary imperative for survival and the self’s interest. This, philosophically, is not acceptable.

Nagel begins the book with a brief discussion of Descartes’ mind-body problem and the limits of science. Then he states that, as evolutionary theory cannot explain consciousness, there must be other truths as “the failure of reductionism requires an alternative to materialism.”* Having removed biological science, Nagel leaves the field of consciousness and moral value to his philosophical profession. Specifically, his position is that there’s “an intelligent underlying order, which long antedates the scientific revolution” that we discover. We see this “intelligible world” through the laws of science that govern the physical world, the rules and laws of logic and mathematics, and “the evident truths of ethics.”**

Nagel then adds that this “intelligible order” has an atheistic teleology attached to it which explains the development of a mind that can, Hegel like, not only recognize this order (e.g., we “see ourselves…as specific expressions simultaneously of the physical and the mental character of the world.”) but also give us the capacity “to form true beliefs” about “the right thing to do.”*** “There is a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness and the value that is inseparable from them,” he states, and this is a process of the “universe gradually waking up.” Toward the end of the book Nagel translates this lofty view into practical ethical reasoning that relies heavily on everyday facts. Actions are motivated by judgments. If someone is in pain, he says, we give aspirin to take the headache away.

This book illustrates a gulf between philosophy and science that does not need to exist. Just because Darwinian theory cannot explain everything does not mean, ipso facto, that it’s wrong and that other truths, by default, must exist. Mind-body problem? There’s no inherent reason why evolution cannot account for the rise of consciousness (mind) as, in our case, the survival advantages of thinking in terms of images and abstractions are so abundantly clear. The question is how to explain the transition from the physiological (atoms, molecules; sensations) to the mental (non-physical thought).****

Nagel’s reference to self-evident moral truth may rest on solid grounds, though in a different way than what he envisions. He puts his truth up there, out there, when it is inherent to our biological being. For example, our need for freedom (to survive; to promote our self-interest), the various versions of the Golden Rule (how does one live together when all need to be free), the essential moral value of equality (to obtain and maintain the balance between one’s freedom and the freedom of the other), and the inherent nature of justice (the fairness that goes with equality and the need for each to be free by not imposing on others and not being imposed upon).

Regarding his argument about aspirin, Nagel makes a universal presumption that one actually cares for the welfare of another and that this is why one provides aspirin. In a world where people willy-nilly take the life of others, “caring about others” doesn’t square and Nagel’s mind cannot make one do “right” if there’s no inner motivation to do so. Darwinian theory can explain this less savory side of our ape natures.***** But it can also provide the solution by tying reason-mind to self-interest. It’s in our self’s interest to respect the freedom of others. We don’t harm others because if we do, it’s a free-for-all and we all lose (Hobbes I). So our first line of defense is to regulate ourselves, to restrain our pursuit of self-interest out of respect for others. When this fails, we must rely on the power of government to provide external restraint (rules, laws and such) on that behavior that imposes on others (Hobbes II). Both of these solutions (self-regulation; external regulation) are the products of mind and reason “designed” by evolution to help us survive. In other words, there’s a moral logic that goes with evolutionary survival. Mind, ideas, do guide our behavior but only if we are motivated. We don’t follow these dictates of moral reason because these are right per se, but because they are in our self-interest. Or, put alternatively, these dictates are right because they are in our self-interest.


*Actually, Nagel cast serious doubt about evolutionary theory in general: “Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how we came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.” Darwinian theory, he goes on to say, “cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.” Elsewhere Nagel states that Darwinian theory flies in the face of “common sense.” Given this point of view, it’s tempting to apply Pauli’s quote here and say that Nagel’s perspective is “not even wrong.”

**While Nagel places his argument in a broad context (hence, the book’s title), his preoccupation is with Platonic-like eternal and universal moral truths. In several places, he slips in his perspective without qualification (e.g., the statement about “evident truths of ethics”). His heavy use of philosophical jargon, unintentionally perhaps, pushes the reader toward his perspective. Thus, Darwinian theory is about the world of “appearances” (i.e., illusion) and evolutionary value (survival, self-interest; pain, pleasure) is “subjectivism” (i.e., biased toward the self), whereas Nagel’s preferred position is referred to as “realism” or “moral realism” (i.e., really real).

*** There are “norms of thought which, if we follow them, will tend to lead us toward the correct answers” to questions about the world so that we can be guided by “objective truth.”

****For a serious discussion of the transition from physical to mental see Bernhard Rensch’s ‘Biophilosophy.’

***** E.g., tribalism; Goodall’s chimpanzees; Madison in Federalist #10, “Men [humans] are not angels.”

[John Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Among many of the so called "Skeptics" and "Free-thinkers", there is little or no skepticism when it comes to their own orthodox naturalistic dogma, the materialistic presuppositions are sacrosanct. If anyone within their camp actually dares to think freely and question any materialist Neo-Darwinian assumptions and metaphysical claims, they are anathema. Nagel is an atheist who actually IS a skeptical free-thinker and of course (as is obvious from the reviews) he is now condemned as heretic by the mainstream "free-thinking" bigoted fundamentalists. Nagel by not toeing the party line, is now stupid and senile; to be mocked, ridiculed and dismissed. The reaction to Nagel questioning cherished materialistic assumptions, can be compared to the reaction of other Muslims to one of their own who was critical of the Koren or who questioned whether Mohammad was a good role model.

I personally didn't agree with everything Nagel wrote, and it was far to short of a work to cover in much depth the multitude of problems within the materialistic world-view, but nevertheless, I appreciate that Negal was willing to be intellectually honest, though he belongs to a community who simply has no tolerance for anyone who verges from the shared naturalistic orthodoxy. I also respect Negal for being willing to float back into the realm of murky mystery, instead of settling for the warm security of the narrow, sacred, neat and tidy materialist box where everything is explained and whatever doesn't fit is explained away.

[Brian Tracz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nagel is a good philosopher, but this is a failed effort. I gave it two stars, corresponding to "fair", in that I believe it provides a decent and unique perspective on this matter. With the number of excellent and innovative books on this issue (see my list of authors below), I cannot recommend the book.

Firstly, it is a sign of the times that we find it surprising when a secular philosopher voices discontent with the metaphysical interpretation of a scientific theory. The scientific theory is evolution by natural selection, and the metaphysical interpretation of it is materialist neo-Darwinism. Daniel Dennett has remarked that natural selection and evolution are the intellectual "acids" that will steadily dissolve other ideological systems that do not march in step -- this is a metaphysical commitment, not a merely scientific one (for one, *optimism* isn't an a priori part of scientific discourse!). But this is a dogmatic move (perhaps with some merit), and we ought not think that ANY scientific theory is *obviously* entails a correlative philosophical position. We need only to look at the history of science for numerous missteps: Nazi medicine held that various parts of evolution entailed genocide, and alleged "anatomical drawings" were long held as justification for enslaving or subjugating black people. These horrific views were pervasive because people did not care to examine whether or not the arguments for the metaphysical view actually made any sense.

So until natural science progresses to a future state which makes conceptually obvious its philosophical implications, I think we should all demand *philosophical* arguments, not dilettantish recitations of data and experimental procedures, to suppose *philosophical* claims. I stand in agreement with Nagel here, but he provides really nothing particularly new on the matter.

In short: Nagel's greatest crutch in this book is the patent weakness of today's unreflective materialism. However, if we look at more subtle views in philosophy (such as non-reductive physicalism or anti-realism), we find that Nagel's criticism is not detailed enough to refute such views, views that do not entail the radical upheaval or rupture that Nagel prescribes for science.

Nagel, therefore, is attacking something of a red herring: Neo-Darwinism is no longer a consensus view amongst philosophers, and it certainly has a number of critics from all realms of the academy (Google them: Stephen J. Gould, Evan Thompson, Slavoj Zizek, Terrence Deacon, Hillary and Steven Rose, Sean B. Carroll, and the list goes on. I recommend reading books by these authors instead). Of course, many people have read Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and the like, so perhaps this book would be surprising in light of the "two-for-one deal" these authors are peddling: "Accept Darwinian natural selection, and your worldview comes for free!" This view is perverse, in my view, and I guess any effort against it (e.g. Nagel's) is at least nobel in this respect.

As for battling materialism: the philosophical effort in this direction is old. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, along with the phenomenological movement that followed, diagnosed with great depth the issues surrounding naive materialism. Husserl and, indeed, Immanuel Kant himself are to be especially commended because they revered the sciences (natural and otherwise) and believed (unlike Nagel) that we need not *empirically* demonstrate science to have limitations in order to see that it has conceptual limits (at least in their present forms).

Nagel's vision that the sciences progress, and that our present sciences will not solve things like the "problem of consciousness", has been formative for me. It is to my disappointment, then, that Nagel essentially argues this point using today's worn concepts of "subject/object" and "qualia", among others. H. Allen Orr's criticism (New York Review of Books) is on target. Regarding Nagel's argument against the Neo-Darwinian picture, Orr notes: "For one thing, there’s not much of an argument here. Instead Nagel’s conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition." If today's conceptual systems are bound to be supplanted, then it is unclear how we can really accept an argument from intuition, that is, an argument that makes use of precisely that conceptual system. Furthermore, our intuitions are *about* the science of today, not a future one. But it is even *harder* to see Nagel's point when he uses concepts like "irreducibly subject experiences" without much argumentative ado -- concepts that have been tirelessly beaten to death in philosophical discourse over the past 50 years.

I could say more, but I believe the reader will find more rewarding reads on the subject. As an aside, Nagel's other books (The View from Nowhere, e.g.) are far better and, honestly, more engaging.

[Moh. Nasiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

آگاهی و شناخت راز بزرگ هستی
"بعضی امور نمی‌توانند به واژه درآیند، آن‌ها خود را آشکار می‌سازند. آن‌ها امور رازآلود هستند"
ویتکنشتاین
قطع نظر از فکت یا فرضیه بودن نظریه تکامل، نیگل در کتاب «ذهن و کیهان» می‌خواهد به ما بگوید که جهان‌نگری به دست‌آمده از نظریه تکاملی ناقص است و چیزهای مهمی مانند آگاهی، شناخت و
ارزش را از قلم می‌اندازد. این کتاب را یکی از مهم‌ترین آثار نیگل دانسته‌اند زیرا که در آن نیگل ردیه محکمی بر ماتریالیسم داشته است. این کتاب با حیرت
فلسفی شروع و درنهایت به حیرت عرفانی ختم می‌شود و تفکرات جریان تکاملی با آرا و نظرات مطلق خود می‌خواهد از جهان حیرت‌زدایی کند از این لحاظِ نیگل «رازباوری» در دلِ فلسفه‌ی خود می‌نشاند
و می گوید چرا تصور ماتریالیست نوداروینی از طبیعت نادرست است

نظریه تکامل داروین با پیامدهای الهیاتی و فلسفی که به دنبال داشت، تاثیری شگرف در جهان‌بینی رایج بر جای گذارد. در عین حال، در طی سال‎های اخیر، نظریاتی در تقابل با فرضیه تکامل توسط برخی دانشمندان ارائه شد که گفتمانی فراگیر را موجب گردیده است. طراحی هوشمند و طبیعت‌باوری غیرمادی، نظریاتی است که می‌توان آن‏ها را رقیب تکامل نامید. طرفداران نظریه طراحی هوشمند اغلب خداباورانی هستند که در تلاشند با خوانش نوینی که از برهان نظم ارائه می‌دهند؛ ضمن نقد مستدل نظریه تکامل با اذعان به پیچیده بودن و غیرقابل‌تقلیل‌بودن برخی ارگانیزم‎ها به گونه‎ای ساده‎تر در پاره‎ای فرآیندهای زیستی، به رد امکان تکامل و تطور در آن‎ها بپردازند و رویکرد خلقت‌گرایانه را اتخاذ نمایند. در این میان توماس نیگل مبدع طبیعت‌باوری غیرمادی (همه‌جاندارانگاری)، با مبانی اعتقادی متفاوت و روشی مشابه، به رد نظریه تکامل می‌پردازد. وی برای طبیعت جنبه‌ای ذهنی قائل است که محصول جانبی ماده نبوده و قابل تقلیل به ماده یا انرژی نیست و با تکیه بر این ایده، ماده‌انگاری فروکاست‎گرا را به چالشی شایان توجه فرا می‌خواند.
(سید امیررضا مزاری)

وقتی مترجم کیهان را بر ذهن نیگل آوار می‌کند!

اگر بنا باشد درباره ترجمه کتاب، داوری کلی ارائه کنیم باید اذعان کرد که متأسفانه مترجم(جواد حیدری) نمره قابل قبولی کسب نمی‌کند. لازم نیست خواننده برای درستی یا نادرستی این ادعا دست به مقابله بزند و متن فارسی را با متن اصلی مقابله کند، بلکه اگر صرفا کتاب ترجمه شده را بخواند این مطلب را تصدیق خواهد کرد.
لینک نقد کامل ترجمه
https://3danet.ir/%D9%86%DB%8C%DA%AF%...

دکتر سروش هم یک سخنرانی با عنوان "داروینیسم در ترازو" داشتند که در آنجا به معرفی بیشتری از این کتاب پرداخت اند
لینک سخنرانی
https://soundcloud.com/school-of-rumi...

تامس نِیگل فیلسوف آمریکایی است که در زمینه فلسفه ذهن،فلسفه سیاسی، فلسفه اخلاق و معرفت‌شناسی پژوهش می‌کند. شهرت او بیشتر به خاطر نقد تبیین‌های تقلیلگرایانه از ذهن به ویژه در مقاله «خفاش بودن چه کیفیتی دارد» و دستاوردهایش در زمینه اخلاق وظیفه گرا است. او در فلسفه اخلاق از امکان دیگرگزینی دفاع می‌کند.

مطالعه بیشتر
https://www.cgie.org.ir/fa/news/142221

[Paul H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's definitely amusing, to me, that even for those professional philosophers who are unknowingly (through no fault of their own) restricted to a denuded conceptual toolset drawn from analytic metaphysics, simplistic rationalist/idealist debates, and a surface-level understanding of the history of philosophy (which apparently began with Descartes?), etc., it's still incredibly easy to figure out ways to show that materialism is wrong.

[Youghourta · Rating 5 out of 5]

ملاحظة: سبق وأن نشرت هذه المُراجعة هنا: https://www.it-scoop.com/2019/04/mind...
ما بين الداروينية المادّيّة والتصميم الذكي/وجود خالق، هل هناك بدائل أخرى؟

كتاب صغير الحجم لكنه صعب المِراس بحكم طابعه الفلسفي البحت. كاتبه هو الفيلسوف والبروفيسور الأمريكي توماس نايجل المُلحِد. ما الحاجة إلى ذكر مُعتقد الكاتب هنا؟ فقط لتبين بأن فكرة الكتاب لا تقوم على أي أساس ديني.

قبل أن أخوض في تفاصيل الكتاب، أودّ أن أشير (وأذكّر) بأن ما قد تقرأه هنا قد لا يكون دقيقًا بالضرورة (لا أضمن بأنني فهمت الكتاب بشكل جيّد بحكم صعوبة وتعقيد الموضوع المُعالج).

الفكرة الأساسية للكتاب هي أنه يمكن الجزم (أو لأكون دقيقًا، يُمكن لنا أن نكون واثقين إلى حد كبير) بأن نظرية التطور والتي تقوم على أساس مادي بحت هي نظريّة خاطئة (أو ليست بالضرورة دقيقة أو كاملة)، من حيث أنها تغفل على أية جوانب لا يُمكن الاستدلال عنها خارج النطاق المادي للعالم الذي نعيش فيه.
حسب الكاتب فإن الجانب المادي لنظرية التطوّر لا يُمكنه بأي حال من الأحوال تفسير نشوء العقل والوعي، حيث أنهما ليسا مُجرد تحصيل حاصل لهذا العالم المادي الذي نحن فيه، بل وجود العقل والوعي هو جزء أساسي ومهم وركيزة من ركائز الطبيعية المُحيطة بنا يحتاج إلى تفسيرٍ لنشوئه، حيث أنه لا يُمكن أن يُعتبر مجرد "نتيجة" أو "حادث عرضي" للجانب المادي المُتمثّل في مجرد تفاعلات كيميائية وخضوع لقوانين الفيزياء.

يشير الكاتب إلى أن الكون الذي نحن فيه يملك غاية في حد ذاته (مبدأ الغائية) وأنه من بين ما يُمكنه إثبات أن نشوء العقل والوعي ليس مجرد نتيجة للعالم المادي هو أن هذا الكون قابل للفهم، أي أنه بإمكاننا أن نفهم قوانينه ومبادئ عمله، كما أن العلم الحديث كله يقوم على أساس أنه يمكنك فهم قوانين الطبيعة واستنباطها والبناء على تلك النتائج.

الكاتب لا يقترح تصوّرا بديلًا لكيفية نشوء الحياة، فهو لا يرى بالضرورة أن النظرة الدينية (وجود خالق خلق المخلوقات كما هي عليه الآن) أو حتى التصميم الذّكي هما البديلان لنظرية التطّور الحديثة. لكنه يشير إلى أن هدفه هو لفت النظر إلى قصور هذه النظرية والتي قد تكون جانبًا فقط من الصورة الكاملة أو ربما لا تكون جزءًا منها إطلاقًا. يشير الكاتب إلى أنه لإيجاد تصوّر بديل، فيجب على الأقل الإقرار بقصور التصوّر الحالي والتفكير في إمكانية وجود بدائل له.

اكتشفت هذا الكتاب لدى قراءتي لكتاب آخر: "الغريزة الإنسانية" والذي يُمكنك أن تقرأ "مُراجعتي" له هنا:
https://www.it-scoop.com/2018/12/the-...

حيث أن الكاتب كينيث ميلير في كتابه هذا كان يردّ على بعض ما ورد في كتاب "العقل و الكون" الذي بين أيدينا في العديد من فصوله (بالمناسبة، قد ترغب في قراءة الكتابين معًا).
المفارقة العجيبة فيما يخص هاذين الكتابين هو أن توماس نايجل (صاحب كتاب العقل و الكون) هو مُلحد، في حين أن ميلر الذي يُدافع على نظرية التطوّر في كتابه هو مسيحي مؤمن.


الكتاب مُهمّ من حيث أنّه يدفعك إلى التفكير رغم أنه لا يقدّم لك حلولًا وبدائل جاهزة.

[Joanne Swenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What if we began, “in the beginning,” with the fact that we think? What if we took seriously the experience we have of ourselves as conscious, mindful beings, in communication with other humans and even other creatures? That we are actually aware of others’ thinking, oft-times understanding another without even a word but a look, a field of energy, a way of crossing our arms, or drawing a bow across a cello string? What are we to make of this phenomenon of minds, communicating in ever-deepening forms of awareness?
That question animates this challenging book, by Thomas Nagel, University Professor at New York University, a distinguished philosopher and author of numerous publications on the philosophy of mind, ethics, and epistemology.
Nagel is non-religious, who, in his own words, “lack(s) the sensus divinitatis that enables – indeed compels – so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose. . .” (12). Yet, in Mind and Cosmos, Nagel arrives at a picture of the evolution of life that must be understood as directed by something toward its flowering in consciousness, self-reflectiveness and increasing understanding of ourselves and the cosmos. In short, the miracles of our minds can only be accounted for by a teleological model. That is, life has been directed toward the emergence of consciousness and the capacity to know ever more accurately our world.
Is this a veiled argument for Intelligent Design? No, but Nagel startles as he acknowledges that proponents of Intelligent Design are right in insisting that current scientific theories of the evolution of life offer impoverished pictures of the miracle of consciousness:
“I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. . .” (7)
Nagel argues brilliantly that scientific materialism (aka “neo-Darwinism” or “evolutionary biology”) stumbles self-destructively when it tries to account for the fact that we live in a world of minds. Moreover, scientific materialism treats minds as a sort of accidental byproduct of chemical processes:
“My guiding conviction is that mind is not just as afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature. . .The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in terms that do not make reference to mind.” ( 16 – 17)
“…(N)o viable account, even a purely speculative one, seems to be available of how a system as staggeringly functionally complex and information-rich as a self-reproducing cell, controlled by DNA, RNA , or some predecessor, could have arisen by chemical evolution alone from a dead environment.” (127)
Scientific materialism fails to adequately account for the profound fact of intelligence, reducing it to barely recognizable characterizations such as, “reproductive success.” Nagel says that not only is this a reductionistic error, but an imperative that the scientific scheme of life’s evolution must start anew, starting with the reality of mind.
Yet, our own minds may never be ready for the revolutionary work of such scientific reconstruction.
“An understanding of the universe as basically prone to generate life and mind will probably require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive. . .It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development.” (127)
As Nagel puts it, we may not yet have awakened to this aspect of self-awareness. . .
“Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” (85)
Of course, you, the reader, must be remembering that Christian reflection long has testified that “in the beginning” was Mind, “The Word” — a Master Mind who intends and executes not only creation, but that creation should know its Creator:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. . . The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him. . .(John 1)
(For an excellent summary of Nagel’s book, read this New Yorker review: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...)

[Taede Smedes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that is certain to raise a lot of eyebrows. Nagel is one of the most famous living philosophers today. That he writes a book that seems to question evolutionary theory and that his scepticism about evolutionary theory is moreover fueled by Intelligent Design seems like potentially explosive material. Nonetheless, this book is definitely not a criticism of evolutionary theory; he presupposes critiques of evolution that he developed in more details elsewhere. He does not reject evolution, he thinks the materialist interpretation of evolution is wrong. The main point, in my view, and a point that seems to be missed by many who comment online, is that Nagel wants to develop the building blocks for an atheist worldview of which matter, consciousness, and value are the fundamental and irreducible building blocks.

The main criticism that I have of the book, is that it is too brief. Many criticisms online focus on the lack of argument, and though this is not entirely fair, there is something to it, in the sense that to understand the book and to be able to put it into context, one needs to have a thorough grasp of Nagel's entire philosophical oeuvre. If one doesn't know anything about Nagel's previous work, this book will be seriously tough going. Nagel should have allowed a little bit more elaboration. 144 pages to give an outline of a complete worldview is simply not enough. Moreover, it invites misunderstanding, as the many rantings on the WWW show.

Whether his atheistic worldview will hold, and whether his idea of how matter and consciousness relate to each other is fruitful, is for the future to decide. However, this is a book that is audacious, and that deserves to be read and discussed widely.

[Deniz Cem Önduygu · Rating 2 out of 5]

One star for the great cover design, one star for the surprise and entertainment I got from reading such backwards thinking.

My two-sentence summary of the book:

Consciousness, reason and value cannot be the products of Darwinian evolution. So they must be among the building blocks of the universe, guiding evolution towards self-awareness and value formation.

Nagel is wise enough to concede that his ideas are "unlikely to be taken seriously in the present intellectual climate". He explains that he is not so much making detailed truth claims as carrying out an exercise in thinking about possible non-theistic alternatives to the materialist Neo-Darwinian paradigm which is "ripe for displacement". Being a materialist Neo-Darwinist, I didn't agree with the motivation but I was curious about the results as a philosophical enterprise; in the end I fell squarely into the group who cannot take it seriously. Rarely do I come across a book this much filled with arbitrary assumptions, bad argumentation and wishful thinking.

"After all, everything we believe, even the most far-reaching cosmological theories, has to be based ultimately on common sense, and on what is plainly undeniable." (p.29)

Common sense died in 1543. It was buried in 1859. In 1905 it was exhumed for autopsy, and in 1920s its ashes were scattered over the sea. It's sad that some important philosophers of mind (Nagel, Searle, ...) still believe in it.

[Melissa Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Been waiting for months to read this. Thanks to my sweet friend Jenny for the birthday gift card that bought it. :)

This is an incredibly valuable book from atheist philosopher Nagel. He is refreshingly honest about the impotence of the materialist/darwinian paradigm and about the fact that he simply isn't willing to consider a theistic alternative because of preference, not because of any evidence against theism. His turn of phrase is often entertaining, as he takes a no-nonsense approach to the current scientific consensus.

I highly recommend this short book to graduate students and grads of philosophy, theology, and apologetics.

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book caused so much controversy simply because Nagel expresses admiration for Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe, perhaps the two leading thinkers of intelligent design. The contaminant of heresy was spreading and needed to be contained.

Nagel himself us an atheist; he doesn't believe in god but he does believe in mind and finds our prevailing materialism is unable to provide a coherent account of a world in which mind exists.

[Giulio Ciacchini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un piccolo saggio molto stimolante.
Certo è pieno di lacune e il concetto di fondo è ripetuto fino allo sfinimento, ma ha comunque il pregio di andare contro corrente e porre sul tavolo delle questioni "inattaccabili".
D'altra parte lo stesso Nagel afferma di non avere un'alternativa.
Egli si concentra sulla pars destruens, necessaria ma non sufficiente, per il progresso scientifico.
Si tratta di un’opera (dichiaratamente) provocatoria che mette in discussione alcuni dei presupposti fondamentali della scienza moderna, in particolare quelli del neodarwinismo e del materialismo riduzionista. Nagel si interroga su come il cosmo e la mente umana siano collegati, sostenendo che l'approccio scientifico tradizionale potrebbe non essere sufficiente a spiegare la complessità della realtà.
Un testo che ho letto recentemente dello scienziato Federico Faggin, risente sicuramente di questa visione.
Faggin parla fa riferimento ad una discontinuità, un salto quantico che intercorre tra gli stimoli elettrici dei nostri sensi e la sensazione finale, che ricade nel reame della coscienza.

Il mio obiettivo polemico è una certa immagine generale e speculativa del mondo, ottenibile per estrapolazione da certe scoperte della biologia, della chimica e della fisica; una particolare Weltanschauung naturalistica che postula una relazione gerarchica tra gli oggetti di quelle scienze e una spiegazione teoricamente compiuta, attraverso la loro unificazione, di tutto ciò che esiste nell'universo. Per nessuna di tali scienze questa visione è condizione necessaria per la pratica e la sua accettazione o non accettazione non avrà alcun effetto sulla maggior parte della ricerca scientifica. Per quanto ne so, la maggioranza degli scienziati di professione non ha alcuna opinione sulle questioni cosmologiche generali cui questo riduzionismo materialistico fornisce una risposta. Le loro ricerche dettagliate e i loro risultati concreti non implicano ovvero non dipendono, in generale, da quest'ultimo né da alcuna altra risposta a tali questioni. Sennonché, tra gli scienziati e i filosofi che invece esprimono un'opinione sull'ordine naturale come un tutto, il materialismo riduzionistico è largamente assunto come l'unica possibilità seria.
Il punto di partenza dell'argomentazione è il fallimento del riduzionismo psicofisico, una posizione nella filosofia della mente ampiamente motivata dalla speranza di mostrare come le scienze fisiche possano fornire, in linea di principio, una teoria del tutto. Se tale speranza è irrealizzabile, sorge la questione se si possa ricavare un'altra comprensione, più o meno unificata, dell'intero cosmo così come lo conosciamo

Egli ritiene che Il pensiero razionale, la nostra capacità di ragionare, fare deduzioni logiche e comprendere il mondo in termini oggettivi sembra richiedere un principio più profondo rispetto alla pura evoluzione biologica.
Allo stesso modo sottolinea come la moralità non possa essere ridotta a impulsi evolutivi o a meri meccanismi di sopravvivenza.
Nagel non respinge l’evoluzione in sé, ma si oppone all’idea che i processi evolutivi siano completamente guidati da forze casuali e cieche. Secondo lui, ci deve essere una spiegazione più ampia, che includa principi teleologici (cioè orientati a uno scopo) capaci di spiegare l’esistenza di ordine e finalità nell’universo. Non propone una visione religiosa o teistica, ma avanza l’idea che ci siano aspetti fondamentali della realtà che la scienza attuale non può cogliere.
Secondo Nagel, il neodarwinismo non è sbagliato come teoria biologica, ma è insufficiente se applicato universalmente per spiegare ogni aspetto della realtà. In altre parole, i processi evolutivi spiegano molte cose, ma non bastano per dar conto della soggettività, del pensiero razionale e della moralità.
Egli propone di integrarlo con un nuovo modo di vedere la realtà.
La teleologia – un'idea di direzione o finalità intrinseca nell'universo – potrebbe essere necessaria per spiegare fenomeni come la coscienza e la razionalità.
Principi ancora ignoti potrebbero essere alla base del comportamento dell'universo, spingendolo verso la complessità e l’autoconsapevolezza.

La storia suona così: non c'è alcun bisogno di una forma di comprensione estesa, al contrario la storia della conoscenza umana ci dà ragione di credere che c'è, in ultima istanza, un modo in cui l'ordine naturale è intelligibile, ovvero attraverso le leggi fisiche: tutto ciò che esiste e tutto ciò che succede può, in linea di principio, essere spiegato per mezzo delle leggi che governano l'universo fisico. Dobbiamo ammettere che non possiamo cogliere l'ordine della natura nel suo pieno manifestarsi, dal momento che è troppo complesso, e perciò abbiamo bisogno di forme più specializzate di comprensione per scopi pratici. Tuttavia, possiamo tentare di scoprire i principi universali che governano gli elementi di cui tutto ciò che esiste è composto e di cui tutta la complessità spaziotemporale osservabile è una manifestazione. Questi principi sono le leggi matematicamente formulabili della fisica di base, le quali descrivono le forze e le particelle, o altre entità fondamentali, e le loro interazioni, almeno finché non sarà scoperto un livello ancora più fondamentale. La descrizione più sistematica possibile di un universo materiale esteso nello spazio e nel tempo è perciò la strada da percorrere perché tutto trovi la sua spiegazione più fondamentale.

Come dicevo egli si scaglia sia contro il naturalismo materialistico sia contro il creazionismo

Per riassumere: le rispettive inadeguatezze di materialismo e teismo come concezioni trascendenti e l'impossibilità di abbandonare la ricerca di una visione trascendente del nostro posto nell'universo conducono alla speranza di una comprensione estesa, e tuttavia naturalistica, che eviti il riduzionismo psicofisico. Il carattere essenziale di tale comprensione sarebbe spiegare la comparsa della vita, della coscienza, della ragione e della conoscenza non come effetti collaterali accidentali delle leggi fisiche della natura né come risultato di un intervento intenzionale nella natura dall'esterno, ma come conseguenza non sorprendente, se non addirittura inevitabile, dell'ordine che governa il mondo naturale dall'interno. Tale ordine dovrebbe includere le leggi fisiche, ma, se la vita non è solo un fenomeno fisico, l'origine e l'evoluzione della vita e della mente non potranno essere spiegate solo dalla fisica e dalla chimica.

Infine, ma non per importanza, Nagel dedica particolare attenzione alla questione della coscienza, uno dei punti più difficili da spiegare per il materialismo. Come può la materia inerte, attraverso processi puramente fisici, generare l’esperienza soggettiva? Nagel suggerisce che il problema non sia solo di dettaglio, ma riguardi l’intero paradigma scientifico attuale, che potrebbe essere insufficiente per affrontare questa sfida.
Il fatto che gli esseri umani abbiano esperienze soggettive e autocoscienza non sembra spiegabile come semplice prodotto di processi materiali.

Se la coscienza soggettiva non è tuttavia riducibile a qualcosa di fisico, allora non sarà parte di questa storia: sarà lasciata completamente inspiegata dall'evoluzione fisica, anche se l'evoluzione fisica di tali organismi fosse di fatto una condizione causalmente necessaria e sufficiente per la coscienza.
La semplice affermazione di tale connessione non è un punto d'arresto accettabile. Non costituisce una spiegazione affermare solamente che il processo fisico dell'evoluzione ha avuto come risultato creature con occhi, orecchie, sistema nervoso centrale e così via e che è semplicemente un fatto bruto della natura che tali creature sono coscienti nei modi a noi familiari. Identificare semplicemente una causa non equivale a fornire una spiegazione significativa senza qualche comprensione del perché la causa produca l'effetto. La tesi che voglio difendere è questa: dal momento che il carattere cosciente di tali organismi è uno dei loro aspetti più importanti, la spiegazione della comparsa di queste creature deve includere una spiegazione della comparsa della coscienza. Questa non può essere una questione separata. Una spiegazione della loro evoluzione biologica deve rendere conto della comparsa di organismi coscienti in quanto tali.
Dal momento che una spiegazione puramente materialistica non può ottenere questo risultato, la versione materialistica della teoria evoluzionistica non può essere tutta la verità. A organismi come noi non capita semplicemente di essere coscienti; perciò nessuna spiegazione del carattere fisico di tali organismi potrà essere adeguata se non è anche una spiegazione del loro carattere mentale. In altre parole, il materialismo è incompleto persino come teoria del mondo fisico, poiché il mondo fisico include organismi coscienti tra i suoi abitanti più sorprendenti.

[Susan Budd · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been a student of philosophy of mind – on and off – since the 1980s. Or earlier, if you count childhood musings on consciousness and cosmos. But after reading Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos and witnessing the firestorm of hysterical abuse showered upon him, I made the hard decision to cut myself off. I would read no philosophy of mind written after 2012. Actually, make that after 2014. I did read Mary Midgley’s Are You an Illusion?

The 1980s was a good time to begin work in philosophy of mind: Not too early, not too late. It meant I only needed to get caught up to 1980 and then I would be right on track and never miss any new development. But then the reductionism started getting me down. Me – an atheist! And where was I to turn for succor? Not dualism. Not theism. I was dissatisfied and my eye began to wander. Poetry started looking mighty hot. At first it was just reality sandwiches in the Village, nothing serious, but then I started to develop feelings.

Philosophy of mind never entirely lost its allure and from time to time I would be tempted back. Then I would indulge myself and even the papers that incensed me in the past took on the charm of the familiar. But as every philanderer knows, it does not last. And then one is off again, strolling the halls of art museums and reading history and psychology and literary criticism.

The latest return of this prodigal scholar was in 2012. I had become aware of Nagel’s common sense critique of reductionism and I hurried home to embrace it. I stayed long enough for Midgley’s dull defense and then I made my decision. I foreswore any philosophy of mind to come – and for that matter, most of the output of the 21st century. I’ll dally with mystics and theologians before I spend another moment defending my mind from the reductionists.

Nowadays I am more interested in how we got into this mess than in participating in it. I don’t strain my neck to look at car crashes on the side of the road and I don’t want anything to do with this wreck either. I consider the present age a lacuna in rational thought, a modern medievalism that consigns philosophy once again to the status of handmaid.

I’ll leave the critique to Nagel and others. The cathedrals are still being built and I cannot bear to watch their construction and embellishment. The shadows they cast are oppressive and I cannot see in the dark.

[James Millikan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mind and Cosmos was the first book of philosophy I have read in over a year, and was my first encounter with a scholarly contribution to the ongoing debate between the materialist, neo-Darwinian understanding of nature on the one hand, and the theories that find such an account of nature unconvincing. Nagel does a fine job of raising objections to the claims of current evolutionary-biological consensus, while highlighting his qualms with the theistic solution. Among the most insightful observations, in my eyes, is Nagel's analysis of the sheer statistical improbability of arriving at humankind's current level of development by random mutation and natural selection given the relatively short period of time in which life has been possible on earth. To make sense of the complexities of the human being, Nagel draws upon an Aristotelian conception of nature and suggests that the development of life is in fact a teleological process, progressing according to some intended, nonrandom end.

Though the text stops short of proposing an entire theory of the cosmos--indeed, Nagel claims that current theories are necessarily limited by our imperfect understanding and will need to be continually refined as time goes on--the book does rather convincingly do that which it set out to do: To show the inadequacy of the current, orthodox, reductionist theory of evolution in making sense of the rich complexity and sophistication of life on this planet.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning more about the unique characteristics of the human psyche, and anyone who is dissatisfied with facile answers to the question of how life developed and why we are here.