The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mindrelated 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. Nagels 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.
[...]... in their reliability—neither a naturalistic account nor a Cartesian theistic one The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain They are clearly part of what is the case, just as much as the data about the physical world provided by perception and the conclusions of. .. the most fundamental explanation of everything Physics and chemistry have pursued this aim with spectacular success But the great step forward in the progress of the materialist conception toward the ideal of completeness was the theory of evolution, later reinforced and enriched by molecular biology and the discovery of DNA Modern evolutionary theory offers a general picture of how the existence and. .. the position that mind, rather than physical law, provides the fundamental level of explanation of everything, including the explanation of the basic and universal physical laws themselves This view is familiarly expressed as theism, in its aspect as an explanation of the existence and character of the natural world It is the most straightforward way of reversing the materialist order of explanation,... history, and its appearance, I believe, casts its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and principles on which the process depends The question is whether we can integrate this perspective with that of the physical sciences as they have been developed for a mindless universe The understanding of mind cannot be contained within the personal point of view, since mind is the product of a... complete understanding of the world, it would have to be the case that either the laws of physics, or the existence and properties of God and therefore of his creation, cannot conceivably be other than they are Physicists do not typically believe the former, 2 but theists tend to believe the latter This doesn’t mean that a theistic world view must be deterministic: God’s essential nature may lead him... including the double relation of mind to the natural order The intelligibility (to us) that makes science possible is one of the things that stand in need of explanation The strategy is to try to extend the materialist world picture so that it includes such an explanation, thereby making the physical intelligibility of the world close over itself According to this type of naturalism, the existence of minds... transcendent conceptions, and the impossibility of abandoning the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe, lead to the hope for an expanded but still naturalistic understanding that avoids psychophysical reductionism The essential character of such an understanding would be to explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge neither as accidental side effects of the physical... explanation of why this is so—nor any other kind of explanation that we know of To make facts of this kind intelligible, a postmaterialist theory would have to offer a unified explanation of how the physical and the mental characteristics of organisms developed together, and it would have to do so not just by adding a clause to the effect that the mental comes along with the physical as a bonus The need... example: There is a physical explanation of why, when I tap “3,” “+,” “5,” and “ = ” into my pocket calculator, the figure “8” appears on the display screen But this causal explanation of the shape on the screen is not an explanation of why the device produced the right answer To explain the result under that description, we must refer to the algorithm governing the calculator, and the intention of the. .. about the opposition between theism and materialist naturalism and what is lacking in each of them 5 The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves This is also the setting for the most heated battles over what physical science can and cannot explain Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves . Murphy) Concealment and Exposure Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament MIND AND COSMOS Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False Thomas Nagel Oxford. any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nagel, Thomas, 1937– Mind and cosmos : why the materialist neo-Darwinian. alt="" MIND AND COSMOS BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Possibility of Altruism Mortal Questions The View from Nowhere What Does It All Mean? Equality and Partiality Other Minds The Last Word The Myth of Ownership