Mind and Cosmos

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

By: Thomas Nagel

Narrated by: Brian Troxell

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.

©2012 Oxford University Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Mind and Cosmos

This is hard to evaluate because I didn't understand some things, and what I did understand I mostly thought he hadn't engaged with the available literature that addresses his concerns and would preclude the need for his theory. He lands on some kind of atheistic metaphysical moral realism teleology. I couldn't buy into it, but it was nice to hear a different pov to the scientific consensus.

He starts with consciousness and values being real objective things, and kind of concludes that everything else is a product of those. It was a lot of "I can't see how the natural world could produce X, so here's another theory." Apart from slipping into god-of-the-gapsism, I think there are already satisfactory explanations and demonstrations for many of the things he presents as definitely unexplainable. And teleology seems to be so un-thought through. There is no one final end product of anything in the world, so it's impossible to say what goal teleologically created beings could meet exactly. With something like a car, we can see how there's a design and blueprint and creative process that produces an exact result that is the goal/end product of that intentional process. But which human is the end product of teleological design? Which kangaroo is the final, perfect kangaroo? Which earwig is the archetype? I think it only works if you take a snapshot of the present and say "This is how everything should be", but not if you see everything in flux.

I personally don't think consciousness is a problem for philosophy and science. I think it's just an illusion, a strange loop of feedback processes, but still a material process. It comes when a brain develops, and it fades when a brain degenerates, and it's gone when the brain no longer operates. There's no reason to think it precedes the material brain, as though waiting for a host to manifest itself. Maybe it does, but why would that be the best explanation?

Nagel also talks about probabilities quite a bit, and I'm not sure how he's using that term each time. Any shuffled deck of cards results in a once-in-the-universe order of cards. But that doesn't imply design. I think Nagel should engage a bit more with evolutionary micro-biology, just to see how mutation + environmental selection fully explains many things we can observe on our time scale, and perhaps he wouldn't need to posit a new mechanism for things that operate on longer time scales.

I'm glad I read this though. I might try something else of his.

finally

a honest, consistent atheist/agnostic writing a good book not full of garbage. it's a chimera to be sure, but a welcome one

Mind meets AI

Very good and deep book about the concept of Mind/ thought. AI researchers must read. period.

surprisingly honest

it is unusual to see a secular academic to write against mainline, pollitically correct materialistic paradigm.
it is a welcomed contribution to a realization that the teleology is real. also, resonate with much of intellifent design on IRREDUCIBILITY of a given phenomenon. be that interdependent molecular machines, or consciousness, or values.
should be a food for thought regardless of your convictions.

IS DARWIN'S THEORY WRONG?

Thomas Nagel believes Darwin’s theory of natural selection is wrong. Nagel suggests natural selection fails to encompass the concept of mind. Even though Nagel acknowledges biology and physics have made great strides in understanding the nature of life, he suggests the mind should be a starting point for a theory of everything. Nagel infers that science research is bogged down by a mechanistic and materialistic view of nature. Nagel suggests science must discover the origin of consciousness to find the Holy Grail; i.e. an all-encompassing theory of nature.

Without agreeing or disagreeing with Nagel’s idea, it seems propitious for the United States to fund and begin their decade-long effort to examine the human brain. Though nearer term objectives are to understand Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, the longer term result may be to discover the origin of consciousness. Contrary to Nagel’s contention that natural selection cannot explain consciousness, brain research may reveal consciousness rises from the same source of mysterious elemental and repetitive combinations of an immortal gene that Darwin dimly understood. Brain research offers an avenue for extension or refutation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

"Mind and Cosmos" is a tribute to Nagel’s “outside the box” philosophical’ thought. Like some who say string theory is a blind alley for a theory of everything, natural selection may be a mistaken road to the origin of life.