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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.
- Sales Rank: #51264 in Books
- Published on: 2012-09-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.80" h x .70" w x 8.40" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 144 pages
Review
"If evolutionary biology redraws its boundaries as this book says it must, then the dialogue between theology and science will be considerably altered." --Anglican Theological Review
"[This] troublemaking book has sparked the most exciting disputation in many years... I like Nagel's mind and I like Nagel's cosmos. He thinks strictly but not imperiously, and in grateful view of the full tremendousness of existence." -- Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
"A sharp, lucidly argued challenge to today's scientific worldview." -- Jim Holt, The Wall Street Journal
"Starts with a boldly discerning look at that strange creature, mankind, and comes to some remarkable speculations about who we are and what our place is in the universe... The very beauty of Nagel's theory - its power to inspire imagination - counts in its favor." -- Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"An intense philosophical takedown of Neo-Darwinism and scientific materialism. It's a brave and contrarian book. Reminds me of Wittgenstein's remark: 'Even if all our scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.'" -- E.L. Doctorow, The New York Times Book Review
"Nagel's arguments against reductionism should give those who are in search of a reductionist physical 'theory of everything' pause for thought... The book serves as a challenging invitation to ponder the limits of science and as a reminder of the astonishing puzzle of consciousness." -- Science
"Mind and Cosmos, weighing in at 128 closely argued pages, is hardly a barn-burning polemic. But in his cool style Mr. Nagel extends his ideas about consciousness into a sweeping critique of the modern scientific worldview." -- The New York Times
"His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist naturalism... [Nagel has] performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age." -- The New Republic
"[This] short, tightly argued, exacting new book is a work of considerable courage and importance." -- National Review
" Provocative... Reflects the efforts of a fiercely independent mind." -- H. Allen Orr, The New York Review of Books
"[Nagel] is an avowed nonbeliever, but regularly enrages the New Atheist crowd because he is determined to leave open a space... for the incomprehensible, for the numinous... and writes very honestly about that." -- James Wood
"This short book is packed like a neutron star. I found myself underlining so much that I had to highlight some underlining with further underlining and flag up this underlining in turn. Mind and Cosmos is a brave intervention." -- Raymond Tallis, The New Atlantis
"Challenging and intentionally disruptive... Unless one is a scientific Whig, one must strongly suspect that something someday will indeed succeed [contemporary science]. Nagel's Mind and Cosmos does not build a road to that destination, but it is much to have gestured toward a gap in the hills through which a road might someday run." -- The Los Angeles Review of Books
"A model of carefulness, sobriety and reason... Reading Nagel feels like opening the door on to a tidy, sunny room that you didn't know existed." -- The Guardian
"Fascinating... [A] call for revolution." -- Alva Noe, NPR's 13.7
"The book's wider questions -- its awe-inspiring questions -- turn outward to address the uncanny cognizability of the universe around us.... He's simply doing the old-fashioned Socratic work of gadfly, probing for gaps in what science thinks it knows." -- Louis B. Jones, The Threepenny Review
"[Attacks] the hidden hypocrisies of many reductionists, secularists, and those who wish to have it both ways on religious modes of thinking ... Fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
"Mind and Cosmos is a mind-provoking, challenging, and enjoying read which carries the mark of Nagel's unique blend of originality, elegance, and intellectual honesty." --Philosophical Psychology
"Mind and Cosmos is...extraordinarily ambitious. Nagel proposes not merely a new explanation for the origin of life and consciousness, but a new type of explanation: 'natural teleology.'" -- Inference: International Review of Science
About the Author
Thomas Nagel is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University. His books include The Possibility of Altruism, The View from Nowhere, and What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2008, he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy and the Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy.
Most helpful customer reviews
292 of 310 people found the following review helpful.
How the universe has come to be aware of itself
By Slow Reader
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. Nagel has no criticism whatsoever of how the scientific enterprise is conducted; he simply questions its claims to completeness.
He is aware that his anti-reductionist project is essentially negative. He has no proposal for explaining how the universe evolved a subjective component, or, as he says, how the universe came to be aware of itself. But he does have ideas of how to shape the discussion. First, he is an atheist and does not accept theistic explanations. He also believes that consciousness arises from matter, but he insists that we face up to the logical consequences of this view: the material universe must have properties that lead to the creation of consciousness. This is a no bigger claim than saying quarks have properties that lead to protons, which lead to atoms, molecules and so forth.
And what are these as yet unrecognized properties of the universe? Nagel appears to find a teleological approach the most plausible. He finds, for instance, that the conscious universe has values, starting as simple animal behavioral responses to pleasure and pain and evolving into the complex value systems of human culture. So value must be an inherent property. He does not limit values to a striving toward goodness; he knows that a teleological universe must take responsibility for suffering as well.
Hopefully this very brief summary will encourage you to read the book. Nagel writes very clearly and the book is meant for a general audience. And if you, like me, have long been unsatisfied with explanations of consciousness by neuroscientists and materialist philosophers of mind, you will find this a satisfying read.
416 of 460 people found the following review helpful.
Philosophy at its best
By Alexei Tsvetkov
It galls me that the only reviewer who gave this book five stars somehow sees it as an argument for theism which is definitely not so. It treats theism more or less like it does materialism - not as a solution to the problem but as a way of explaining it away, in the particular case of theism simply by kicking the can further down the road (See Nagel's recent review of the new Alvin Plantinga's book in NYRB).
For me, however, the main thrust of its argument is against the currently prevalent physicalist reductionism which has been my own worldview for the past ten years or so for the lack of anything better. I have always been aware of the unease with which this approach treats the problem of mind and consciousness, tying itself into knots by either ignoring it altogether as a purely subjective realm of qualia or squeezing it into the general deterministic scheme of thing and denying the possibility of free will and moral choice.
It takes a lot of intellectual courage to point out that consciousness is not an ephemeral byproduct of the evolution but its essential component that begs to be included in every attempt of the exhaustive explanation of reality. Thomas Nagel is one of a few who possess that kind of courage.
And please, do not believe someone who calls the book "tidious". It is extremely lucid for this kind of philosophical work, reads like an adventure novel. A veritable marvel of a book, a rare pleasure.
35 of 36 people found the following review helpful.
5 stars for courage
By Perry Marshall
You've got to admire a guy who stands up against an entrenched, largely mannerless establishment and points out that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes.
This book opens a conversation that's long overdue. The book has some great soundbytes:
In response to those who say 'the universe requires no explanation, since there are infinite universes and we'd inevitably find ourselves in one of them' he replies:
"If I ask for an explanation of the fact that the air pressure in the transcontinental jet is close to that at sea level, it is no answer to point out that if it weren't, I'd be dead."
On page 83 he points out that humans value reason above physical circumstances or comforts, and the mystery of how our minds make contact with rationality cannot be explained by survival alone.
Nagel uses philosophy to touch scientific questions that have been raised by Hubert Yockey, for example, who shows that the origin of the genetic code is "possible but not knowable," because while it obeys the laws of physics, the laws of physics do not explain how any code comes into being.
On page 53 he touches on questions about the process of evolution itself - he argues for "abandoning the standard assumption that evolution is driven by exclusively physical causes." This thinking is very much in line with much of the field of bioinformatics and recent evolutionary researchers such as Jablonka, Shapiro, Kirschner and Witzany.
On page 106: "An adequate conception of the cosmos must contain the resources to account for how it could have given rise to beings capable of thinking successfully about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on their own beliefs."
I do have some criticisms. At numerous points he drifts into statements that are purely his own conception of how things seem to be. I also think his dismissal of theistic philosophy is unwarranted. At one points he simply states that there is no evidence for God and then moves on with no further justification... as though the matter has long been settled.
Inferences to God and philosophical arguments for God are no more easily dismissed than anything else he argues in this book; just read Antony Flew's last work. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga's review of this book is well worth a read, by the way.
It is inevitable that an author such as Nagel will be smeared by hardline Darwinists and New Atheists, who generally don't trouble themselves with such inconveniences as civility and dialogue. I give him 5 stars for the courage to take on a cabal of vocal and peevish bullies.
I salute him even more for taking a middle position between the theists and materialists, knowing that he will get flack from both sides. Mr. Nagel, thank you for writing this book.
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