Cc: In order to critique Thomas Nagel’s 2013 essay, “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’” which has been part of a public dialogue for thirteen years. I claim fair use in reposting the entire 900 word essay, leaving Nagel’s words unaltered, since I’d rather meet all of them straight on. Slicing and dicing Nagel’s words would distort them and I don’t want to do that.
I offer a closer look and questions. I invite good-faith constructive criticism, push back, & other comments.
The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’
BY THOMAS NAGEL - August 18, 2013 - The Stone
Nagel: This is a brief statement of positions defended more fully in my book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” which was published by Oxford University Press last year. Since then the book has attracted a good deal of critical attention, which is not surprising, given the entrenchment of the world view that it attacks.
Cc: It’s important to appreciate why the rules of science came about.
Thinkers of the day recognized the Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide. On the one hand there was physical reality that simply was. It could be fairly objectively studied with a carefully constructed set of rules and guidelines.
Opposed to that, what else is there in the universe? Human opinion? Our individual and collective bias driven ideas? Our boundless thoughts that possess no regard for the constraints of physical reality?
What else is out there, besides assumptions?
Nagel: It seemed useful to offer a short summary of the central argument.
The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.
We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else,
Cc: That is fundamentally wrong!
There is a profound difference between basic atomic elements - as opposed to the biological molecules that create life.
It also ignores the significance of nature hammering out the Kreps cycle that basically invented biology, with life building upon that foundation.
Nagel: and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems,
it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.
Cc: Sounds akin to our search for the Holy Grail.
Nagel: However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning.
The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time –
Cc: Right.
Science is equipped to study the physical world around us.
Focusing on the “what” and “how’ questions - not the “why” question.
Science is observing and measuring.
It is left to scientists with their expanding understanding and imaginations to take those facts and compose “descriptions”of what the gathered facts infer.
That is a subtle, but pivotal distinction.
Nagel: There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience.
Cc I read that as an expectation that we should have the ability to know what is going on inside another’s mind. (I’m told I’m mistaken, but no explication has been offered yet.)
Why are the observations of consciousness, along with the mechanisms that produce it, not enough for building understanding around?
Something can not take up the space that something else already exists within.
No creature can know the mind of another creature. Why not, you ask?
Because the mind is a product of one specific Living Being interacting within one specific milieu.
Senses + body + brain + interaction (interior & exterior) = “I AM.”
Each to their own kind. Remove any of those elements and the rest collapses.
Nagel: how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.
Cc: Think about the challenge Nagel throws down.
If we can’t experience the conscious experience of another, … we know nothing?”
Nagel: So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained.
Cc: The totally personal inner experience of living? The actual experience of experiencing another’s experience?
It looks to me like Nagel wants to capture something that cannot be captured — that isn’t a scientific problem, it’s a contrivance.
Science rejects such a conceit and is content to allow the physical evidence to speak for itself, within well defined parameters.
After all, an object cannot exist within a space that an object already exists within. But Nagel objects, he demands more. To me it sounds like science-fiction territory.
Nagel: Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone.
Cc: Okay, we’ll never inhabit the essence of another animal.
Impossible expectations are impossible to satisfy. Humanity has always had to rely on incomplete information and mystery - doing the best we can, with what we have.
Ironically, Nagel recognizes that “the mental arises through the development of animal organisms” - so, what is all this difficulty about?
A personal longing to experience another’s experience?
What’s missing from “Consciousness” developing as creatures and life styles evolve in complexity, driven by evolving environmental complexity.
That dance between chemistry, biology and Earth’s geology and time creating totally insane stuff that worked. That built the foundation of our existence.
Engaging in more complex behaviors and risks, within an ever adapting body with information processing features, that got developed and handed down generation after generation, not a single fail. Or, game over! “Nature” is consistent and unforgiving.
Generation after generation, one day at a time. Your lineage was a surviver and it has nothing to do with you, or me. It has to do with life’s “Drive To Thrive” given a chance.
Nagel: Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms,
Cc: Okay, then why not start taking those implications more seriously and spending more time personally finding what actually happened during this pageant of evolution, and how it impacted who I am and what I am.
Nagel: and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence,
Cc: I don’t think that’s an honest assessment of science.
It’s a personal statement of opinion. Science can’t hand us the experience of an experience.
But science can pretty well explain everything else that unfolded during the physical “experience" that triggers the cascade of inner experience - in the thinking and life directing process that is mind.
Expecting to know what it feels like to experience another creature’s experience, feels to me like expecting Nature to prove itself to us.
Rather than us trying grasp the complexity and glory of what our human bodies are doing.
Nagel: it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory.
Cc: It follows from what? An expectation? Please someone explain.
What else is there supposed to be?
Biological and general Earth sciences has been making amazing breakthroughs with some beautiful constructive new insights - but if it’s written off as “uninteresting” and ignored, TLDR. Whatchagonnado
Nature isn’t responsible for our impossible expectations.
Science is here to study Nature, not wrestle with human expectations.
Science provides data, then we humans are responsible to doing all the rest.
Nagel: This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena.
Cc: What appearance of mental phenomena in the universe?
We know of no mental phenomena out in the universe ! What am I missing?
Besides, I myself am satisfied with focusing on comprehending the Earth bound evolved consciousness spectrum, before reaching for the stars.
Nagel: and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.
Cc: How about questioning our own human hubris, self-absorption, self-serving nature, and how that blinds us to much that is out there, and then try adopting a slightly less self-centered attitude toward understanding life’s secrets?
Maybe we could start learning from science and stop endlessly beating what is, at root, a theological dead horse - and our general refusal to come face to face with our kinship to the rest of Earth’s biosphere, with its cascading insights.
Nagel: There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either
Cc: What does that even mean?
Consciousness is the irreducible product of a biological organism’s internal communication - it is what enable a creature to interact and constructively engage with its world. Its level of sophistication is dependent on body type and interacting with environment.
When the dynamo of a living organism goes still, consciousness is no longer produced.
Read a few of Nick Lane’s books, his most recent, Transformer and especially its Epilogue titled SELF is wonderfully clarifying.
Nagel: (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else
Why should we regard it as anything?
Cc: It? Consciousness? Why regard it as anything at all?
Science explains that it’s more like an emanation of biological processes and not any material thing.
Consciousness is the product of my body living its life, and the cumulative product of half a billion years. It possesses layers of understanding, strategies, and drive to thrive totally beyond our ability to comprehend..
I was fortunate and became aware long ago that my body possessed more knowledge than I do. Looking back I now know that my body has done a better job of taking care of me, than I have myself. And the decades have only reinforced and built upon that honest biological reality.
The answers are within a sober scientific assessment of the Pageant of Earth’s Evolution, not within our ego driven human imagination bubble. It’s why understanding the evidence requires a degree of humility most people can’t fathom these days.
Nagel: (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.
Cc: That is mysterianism and I find no justification, nor need for it.
Nagel: All four of these positions have their adherents. I believe the wide popularity among philosophers and scientists of (a), the outlook of psychophysical reductionism, is due not only to the great prestige of the physical sciences but to the feeling that this is the best defense against the dreaded (d), the theistic interventionist outlook. But someone who finds (a) and (b) self-evidently false and (c) completely implausible need not accept (d), because a scientific understanding of nature need not be limited to a physical theory of the objective spatio-temporal order. It makes sense to seek an expanded form of understanding that includes the mental but that is still scientific — i.e. still a theory of the immanent order of nature.
Cc: This construct is also a product of centuries old academic arguments, with egos and careers and competition and institutional inertia playing a not insignificant role.
Nagel: That seems to me the most likely solution. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative.
Cc: “A naturalistic, though non-material alternative” ??
The only naturalistic non-material alternative we have is the human mind. But the human mind is not up to the task without nature’s guardrails, so that leaves mysterianism and the Holy Grail - or science, and recognizing limits to what we can know.
Nagel: 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.
Cc: This comes across as nothing so much as an argument from ignorance, because of a decision not to take biological findings seriously enough to face up to and puzzle through their implications.
What degree of understanding is expected? After all understanding, like consciousness is on a continuum.
Besides, serious understanding needs to be earned with lots and lots of good-faith curiosity and homework.
Nagel: 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.
Cc: I’m told the D-N-C paradigm doesn’t have anything to do with theology. I don’t buy it.
Cc’s guiding principles:
Appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide
Taking on board the reality of inhabiting a creature that has half a billion years worth of generational learning and a living legacy embedded under its bellybutton.
Realizing your body/brain possesses knowledge, strategies and goals totally beyond our conscious mind’s ability to recognize.
Then came science.
It cut some windows through the bubble of our individual & collective mindscape, and it makes fairly objective measurements and observations of the physical world outside and within our bodies.
Recognizing that my mind and sense of introspective-consciousness is in reality an interior reflection of my physical biological senses-body-brain communicating with itself, while negotiating the living physical reality that’s racing past us at any particular moment.
Why consciousness - because no creature can exist without it in a world full of hungry mouths looking for their next supper!
Your mind?
Well, that is the cumulative total of all the existential experiences of one’s life time processed through one’s biological complex and perceptual lens.
Then, somewhere along this path we realize, Oh wow, we must create our own gods, out of the struggles, fears, and desires and dreams of our own inner being. My god is as real, or not, as I/we ourselves want them to be. This deserves some serious reflection and reassessment of old notions.
As an aside, it’s also worth considering that each living creature is the center of their world - ergo, “truth” means nothing without a recognized frame of reference.
Leaving me to conclude that striving for “honesty” and “critical thinking skills” might be a more productive goal during one’s “life’s project”, that is our journey from the place of our birth, to the place of our death. Same as it ever was.
This is why all of our gods, so closely resemble our own pettiness and desires — rather than the wisdom of Deep time and Nature’s rhythms.
Thank you for your time,
Peter
{Cc: For the record, I will be sharing this with Thomas Nagel, out of fair play; hoping for his blessing; perhaps offer some pushback. Should he object, I’ll respect whatever he asks.}
