Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False Author: Thomas Nagel | Language: English | ISBN:
B008SQL6NS | Format: EPUB
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False Description
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.
- File Size: 1735 KB
- Print Length: 136 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0199919755
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 29, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008SQL6NS
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #25,215 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Physics > Cosmology - #15
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Thomas Nagel is well-known for asking the question, "What is it like to be a bat?" I think it is a useful exercise to try to answer this question before reading his Mind and Cosmos. At dusk I see bats navigating expertly around trees and making precise changes of course to pluck an insect from the air. Bats evidently have as accurate a representation of three dimensional space as we do but with one crucial difference: it is constructed by a brain that relies on sound rather than light. Try to imagine that. Having a very detailed understanding of how neurons fire in the bat brain will get us no closer to understanding what it is like to be a bat. The same can be said of understanding human consciousness. A scanner that could show us the intricate patterns of neurons firing in real time would be a scientific (and aesthetic) marvel, but viewing the output would bring us no closer to understanding the experience of awareness, the meaning of the thoughts, of what it is like to be that person whose brain is being scanned. Material explanations cannot lead to the understanding of non-material consciousness.
Nagel builds on this insight more thoroughly than any other thinker I am aware of. His claim in this book is that science, being objective and materialist, can make only a limited claim to a Theory of Everything (TOE) because it cannot explain essentially subjective phenomena. Awareness, in all its forms in life on Earth, is a cosmological fact as much as is matter, organized as it is into particles, stars and brains. Science is very successful at prying out the material consequences of the big bang, where each new level of complexity is built on the inherent properties of lower levels.
This is an odd book by a very respectable, established philosopher. The arguments are sensible, responsible, and are shared more or less by a number of reputable scientists, yet the reader knows the book is a potential outrage to the gatekeepers of materialism. That is what is weird. It reminds me of the Army-McCarthy hearings when Joseph Nye Welch directly challenges the man himself ("Have you left no sense of decency?"), and instead of incurring suspicion...he gets applauded by everyone in the gallery! And so should Nagel. He merely points out that there is a Darwinism-of-the-gaps at work in much of the scientific community, and perhaps it is time to step back and take a more balanced, imaginative look at a world that in certain respects strongly resists a materialist-reductionist reading. Science is supposedly eager to upset everything, but in actual fact there are sacred limits to what some scientists (or self-appointed popularists of scientism) are willing to question. Nagel's own suggestions point toward a less-than-rosy teleological neutral monism. Honestly, I don't see what is so frightening about that, even for a God hater. The most "scandalous" thing about the book is that it credits (almost as a side note) ID people with asking some very good questions, and concedes that some form of theistic intentionalism is not preposterous given certain features of the world. He himself stays far away from theism for reasons he clearly states, but he is outrageous enough to forego insults. (Naughty Thomas, neither hot nor cold, fit to be spewed from God's mouth!)
The book is very carefully reasoned and at times not quite "popular" in its technicality.
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