OK I’ve spent a couple of hours on this post. Apologies for my somewhat snarky first response to it, as Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos is a book that I think is very important, and yet much maligned. In fact, I think we’re actually much closer in some respects than you may think, but I believe you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Nagel is talking about.
The first thing I’d distinguish is science from scientism. Nagel is not attacking science, and certainly not questioning the extraordinary achievements of the physical sciences. In fact, he explicitly acknowledges their “extraordinary success (of the sciences) in their own domain.” His target is the assumption that the particular conception of nature developed by the physical sciences — a conception deliberately constructed by excluding the mental, subjective, intentional and purposive — can therefore constitute a complete account of nature.
That distinction matters throughout your reading of the piece.
You repeatedly interpret Nagel as demanding something like access to another creature’s private experience:
“I read that as an expectation that we should have the ability to know what is going on inside another’s mind.”
But that isn’t what Nagel is saying. His point is much closer to the one he made in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, an essay that became famous in the 1980’s. A complete description of the neural processes associated with an experience is still a description from the outside. It tells us what is happening in the organism objectively, but it doesn’t thereby explain the subjective character of the experience — what it is like for the organism itself.
And notice that this isn’t an argument from our inability to climb inside another person’s head. It’s a question about the purported comprehensiveness of the explanation. ‘Scientism’ will claim that an objective account will leave nothing out. Nagel is saying, well, it leaves out what it is like to be an organism, what the organism’s experience of life actually is.
Note the difference!
You say:
“Science can pretty well explain everything else that unfolded during the physical ‘experience’ that triggers the cascade of inner experience.”
Perhaps it can explain an enormous amount —that is not in question. But “we can explain a great deal about the neural and biological processes associated with consciousness” is not the same proposition as “we have explained why those processes are accompanied by subjective experience in the first place” or "what it means to the organism (or being) that has them.
That is the problem Nagel is pointing to. And actually, you yourself are supplying that sense, without your noticing it. You know that “what it means” to the organism is significant in its own right.
There is another important point where I think your argument slips past the actual argument. You repeatedly appeal to evolution:
“Consciousness is the product of my body living its life, and the cumulative product of half a billion years.”
But this simply restates the evolutionary history of consciousness. It doesn’t yet explain consciousness in its first-person sense.
If I say that the eye evolved through natural selection, for example, I have explained something important about how eyes came to exist. I haven’t thereby explained everything about the nature of vision. Likewise, tracing the evolutionary history of nervous systems and increasingly sophisticated information-processing capacities is enormously informative, but it doesn’t by itself settle the philosophical question of why any of that processing should be accompanied by experience. And why? Because the subjective nature of experience has been bracketed out of the scientific account since the Scientific Revolution.
That is the explanatory gap Nagel is targeting.
And I think there is an irony here. You accuse Nagel of being insufficiently attentive to biology, whereas he is actually asking whether our present conception of biology is adequate to explain the phenomenon we are trying to explain. More evolutionary detail isn’t necessarily an answer to that question. At some point one has to ask whether the explanatory framework itself is sufficient.
There is also a terminological issue that I think is worth clearing up.
You write:
“Science explains that it’s more like an emanation of biological processes and not any material thing.”
But that isn’t a scientific finding. It is a philosophical interpretation of scientific findings — and a quite substantive one. And you’re inserting that into the picture in many places. Many, or even most, evoliutionary science, would say no such thing!
In fact, you brought Mark Solms into the discussion yourself, and he makes essentially this point explicitly. As he puts it:
“The brain does not ‘produce’ consciousness in the sense that the liver produces bile, and physiological processes do not cause—or become or turn into—mental experiences through some curious metaphysical transformation.”
So when you say that “science explains that it’s more like an emanation of biological processes”, you’re going considerably further than the science itself says! Indeed, you’re asserting precisely the kind of brain-to-consciousness relation that Solms warns against assuming.
This is also why I don’t think Nick Lane provides the answer you think he does. Lane’s work is fascinating precisely because it shows how extraordinarily deep and contingent the biological story is — bioenergetics, metabolism, cellular organization, evolution, and so forth. But none of that entails that consciousness is simply reducible to those processes. Lane is doing evolutionary biology; he isn’t thereby providing a solution to the philosophical problem of consciousness, and I’m sure if I dug into his writings, I could find an example of him saying that.
In fact, I think your own position contains an interesting tension.
You say that consciousness is an “emanation” of biological processes, but you also repeatedly emphasize how much biological organization and knowledge lies beneath conscious awareness:
“my body possessed more knowledge than I do.”
I agree that there is something profoundly important here! It’s one of the major points about my ‘Mind as cause or consequence’ piece. Organisms contain vastly more capacity than conscious reflection can encompass. Contemporary biology has made that increasingly apparent. Intelligence pervades the biosphere, you could say. It’s practically panpychism!
But that still leaves open the question Nagel is asking: why should any of this information processing be conscious at all?
That isn’t answered by saying that consciousness evolved because it was useful, either. Evolution can explain why a trait was selected once the trait exists; it doesn’t automatically explain why the trait has the phenomenal character it has.
And this brings me to what I think is the biggest misreading in your post.
You write:
“Science rejects such a conceit and is content to allow the physical evidence to speak for itself.”
But that is almost exactly where Nagel would object. Science itself doesn’t say that the physical description is all that reality consists of. That’s a philosophical extrapolation from a particular scientific method.
The great achievement of modern science was partly made possible by deliberately bracketing subjective experience, meaning, intention and purpose. Nagel’s question is whether we can then turn around and say: “Since science successfully excluded these things from its descriptions, they must therefore be reducible to what remains.”
That is precisely the difference between scientism and science.
And I think your own final paragraphs actually illustrate the problem rather nicely. You write:
“truth means nothing without a recognized frame of reference.”
That sounds considerably more philosophical than you perhaps realize. You are making a claim about truth and the conditions under which truth has meaning. Science doesn’t establish that proposition. Physics itself brackets out context as far as possible, so as to analyse the interactions of precisely-defined bodies. Nor does the fact that every organism occupies its own ecological and perceptual niche establish that truth is therefore merely relative to a frame of reference.
So I wouldn’t characterize your position as “science versus Nagel.” I’d characterize it as one philosophical interpretation of science versus another.
And there is one last point I’d gently push back on. You seem to think Nagel is driven by a desire to capture something that “cannot be captured,” and therefore that he is asking science to do the impossible. But I think that misses his actual ambition. He isn’t asking physics to become omniscient. He’s asking whether our conception of nature needs to become richer if it is to explain the existence of conscious organisms.
Indeed, Nagel explicitly rejects both the idea that consciousness is simply an inexplicable accident and the idea that we therefore need divine intervention. His position is that there may be a naturalistic but non-materialist conception of nature still waiting to be developed.
That is a much more interesting position than “science can’t explain consciousness, therefore science is wrong.”
And I think this is where your own position becomes philosophically interesting. You seem to want to say that consciousness is entirely a product of biological organization while at the same time resisting the idea that consciousness is “just” another physical object. That’s where I agree with you! But once you start doing that, you are already doing philosophy rather than simply reporting on science.
So I wouldn’t call Nagel anti-science. I’d call him anti-scientism — and, in particular, opposed to the idea that the methodological abstraction that made physical science possible must also be the final ontology of nature.
That’s a much narrower claim, but also, I think, a much harder one to dismiss.
