Nagel's Project in Mind and Cosmos

[anonymous66]

Sources:
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False-Oxford University Press 2012
Thomas, Alan Price (2018) Intelligibility All the Way Down : Nagel on Mind and Cosmos. Klesis Revue philosophique. 1–29. ISSN 1954-3050

Alan describes Mind and Cosmos as the latest development in Nagel's anti-reductionism (something Nagel has been writing about for 40 years). Nagel opens with the claim that there is a problem with the way we understand ourselves in regards to the physical/mental distinction. The first example he uses is the problem of placing consciousness in the physical world. But the problem extends beyond just consciousness. In order to solve the problem involves a radical change in our self-understanding. From Mind and Cosmos "[A] true appreciation of the difficulty of the problem must eventually change our conception of the place of the physical sciences in describing the natural order".

We have 2 ways of understanding ourselves- and there is a tension between these two ways. 1. We think of ourselves as conscious subjects who have a rational nature and who engage with value. 2.We think of ourselves as part of the natural order. Natural order- a conception of nature that exists independently of us. We claim to know nature via different forms of understanding- science being one of those forms.

"Nagel believes that a tension arises because, at the level of reflection, we have two sets of irreconcilable commitments: that to which we seem committed when we explain mentality seems to be ruled out by a conception of ourselves as part of the natural order as that later idea has been developed by the physical sciences." Nagel suggest that science has been looking in the wrong direction because of the comments of philosophers on the content and implications on/about science. From Mind and Cosmos, "[A] comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry and physics- a particular naturalistic Weltanshaaung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification". <----- What Nagel is doing here is describing a philosophical view that extrapolates from the success of science to a comprehensive philosophical naturalism that is also committed to explanatory completeness and unification by explanatory reduction.

[Hereandnow]

Sources:
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False-Oxford University Press 2012
Thomas, Alan Price (2018) Intelligibility All the Way Down : Nagel on Mind and Cosmos. Klesis Revue philosophique. 1–29. ISSN 1954-3050

Alan describes Mind and Cosmos as the latest development in Nagel's anti-reductionism (something Nagel has been writing about for 40 years). Nagel opens with the claim that there is a problem with the way we understand ourselves in regards to the physical/mental distinction. The first example he uses is the problem of placing consciousness in the physical world. But the problem extends beyond just consciousness. In order to solve the problem involves a radical change in our self-understanding. From Mind and Cosmos "[A] true appreciation of the difficulty of the problem must eventually change our conception of the place of the physical sciences in describing the natural order".

We have 2 ways of understanding ourselves- and there is a tension between these two ways. 1. We think of ourselves as conscious subjects who have a rational nature and who engage with value. 2.We think of ourselves as part of the natural order. Natural order- a conception of nature that exists independently of us. We claim to know nature via different forms of understanding- science being one of those forms.

"Nagel believes that a tension arises because, at the level of reflection, we have two sets of irreconcilable commitments: that to which we seem committed when we explain mentality seems to be ruled out by a conception of ourselves as part of the natural order as that later idea has been developed by the physical sciences." Nagel suggest that science has been looking in the wrong direction because of the comments of philosophers on the content and implications on/about science. From Mind and Cosmos, "[A] comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry and physics- a particular naturalistic Weltanshaaung that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification". <----- What Nagel is doing here is describing a philosophical view that extrapolates from the success of science to a comprehensive philosophical naturalism that is also committed to explanatory completeness and unification by explanatory reduction.

What an interesting post. I don't read Nagel, here and there at best, but from what I gather, he is confronting the assumptions of analytic philosophy about how to proceed, and the results of philosophy trying to insert itself into the role in speculative science dramatically misses what philosophy is really all about (which is why issues arise), which is foundational questions, not derivative ones. A person, a self, is not reducible to what empirical science can say. Even if some quantum physicist were find some abhorrent behavior in particle physics linked to neuronal paradigms, it is still not going to be about foundational issues. For these, there is only the phenomenologist. The only way to confront the failure to have a consensus about what a human self that emerges from biology, geology, physics, chemistry talking past each other, that is, not having an extrapolation from what they say that yields a unified account, is to accept these fields do NOT do philosophical ontology or metaphysics, these terms being badly defined, granted; but then, that is the problem, isn't it? The problem is that empirical science presupposes something else, and it is treated by analytic philosophers as if it were the foundation for philosophy, and it thereby makes itself parasitic on "real" scientists, which is what they long to be, and in this they simply missed the boat, for phenomenology set sail long, long ago, with Russell, Wittgenstein and the positivists waving at the platform.

Philosophy has come to a very special point where it can finally see that its "end" has always been not a collective endeavor for propositional truth, but a personal endeavor for epiphanic truth, and the way to this is phenomenology, which examines the "giveness" of the world.

I wonder what Nagel would say on this: "Explanatory reduction" is a term that refers to the inevitable misrepresentation that is committed by language which reduces the world to its own paradigms, and language can be characterized as a body of "paradigms," right down to the salt and pepper on the kitchen table. The problem is this: once you get down to basic level analysis, you have to confront language, which divides the world into kinds. Physics has its kinds, biology has its and so on. The assumption that these kinds will converge on a unified theory of the self admits that the outcome will still remain empirical, and what is empirical can never satisfy for questions about the nature of the empirical itself. This is the passageway to metaphysics, real metaphysics, that "observes" the place, the theoretical zone, where the actual constructive genesis of experience is brought to light. This is Fink and Husserl (and others). It's not that theory "crosses over" into the impossible, but it takes one to the threshold. An extraordinary philosophical read.

[anonymous66]

It's more accurate to say that Nagel is an analytic philosopher who challenges the assumptions of reductionist naturalism. He accepts all the evidence that scientists have collected- but he rejects the underlying assumptions of reductive naturalism.

Nagel's ultimate goal in Mind and Cosmos is to argue that reductive naturalism is false- because:
1. Reductionist naturalism undermines our confidence in our ability to form true beliefs- to know.
2. Reductionist naturalism cannot explain consciousness. If reductive naturalism, then all that exists is matter- as described by it's physical characteristics. If reductive naturalism, then mental states/consciousness are/is not real. Mental states/consciousness are/is real- therefore reductive naturalism is false.
3. Reductionist naturalism is not consistent with objective morality. Morality is objective, therefore reductive naturalism is false.

[Terrapin Station]

We have 2 ways of understanding ourselves- and there is a tension between these two ways. 1. We think of ourselves as conscious subjects who have a rational nature and who engage with value. 2.We think of ourselves as part of the natural order. Natural order- a conception of nature that exists independently of us.

Those aren't two different ways of understanding ourselves in my view. And re (2), it's important to stress that the "natural order" doesn't ONLY exist independently of us. If we're a part of it, it exists AS us, too.

Nagel believes that a tension arises because, at the level of reflection, we have two sets of irreconcilable commitments: that to which we seem committed when we explain mentality seems to be ruled out by a conception of ourselves as part of the natural order as that later idea has been developed by the physical sciences.

Which is nonsense. It might be that Nagel thinks of it that way, but that's because he can't move past some "old tapes" that are embedded in his thinking. Basically an outdated paradigm that he was suckered into at some point in the past, probably as a kid or something.

There's really no conflict between the mental and the physical. Mentality is simply a subset of physical phenomena.

and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification

Thinking that GUTs have anything to do with explaining things like how audio CDs work (how it works that they store and eventually "produce" music that comes out of loudspeakers), to pick a relatively arbitrary example, is one of the dumber misunderstandings that is ridiculously prevalent--even among people who should know better, like Nagel. A GUT isn't going to explain how an audio CD works. That's not at all the aim of a GUT. This doesn't suggest that there's some mysterious "nonphysical" aspect to audio CDs. The same is true of minds-as-subsets-of-brain-states.

All of these comments hinging on explanations ("comprehensive philosophical naturalism that is also committed to explanatory completeness") are a bunch of balderdash without a better analysis of just what explanations are, just what the relationship is between explanations and what they explain, etc.

[Terrapin Station]

If reductive naturalism, then mental states/consciousness are/is not real.

Sigh--I'm so sick of that nonsense. This is not at all the case.

The crap about "we can't explain," again, requires us to talk about what explanations are, exactly, what there relationship is to what they're explaining, etc.

[anonymous66]

Nagel himself advocates a kind of philosophical naturalism. (Alan) Thomas suggests that we should view Nagel's project as one of advocating his own naturalism while criticizing what Nagel refers to as "reductionist naturalism"- but Thomas also notes that the proponents of the view that Nagel criticizes actually see themselves as advocating naturalism and would reject the "reductionist" label. The proponents of what Nagel calls "reductionist naturalism" see themselves as promoting the one true naturalism.

Nagel does not critique any of the results of the physical sciences, but rather the philosphical view that is extrapolated from them-
From Mind and Cosmos "[S]uch a world view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences... most practicing scientists may have no opinion about the overarching cosmological questions to which this materialist reductionism provides an answer."

This critique of reductionist naturalism is similar to Nagel's critique of what he labeled "physicalism" in his book The View from Nowhere. This critique is grounded in Nagel's radical realism.

Nagel believes that because we humans are fallible, our current form of scientific understanding is inherently limited. There are things that we cannot know now because of our current way of understanding things. In his critique of physicalism "the physicalist, like the idealist, is accused of cutting reality down to size: of privileging one form of description of the world that aspires to be both comprehensive and complete." Nagel thinks that this is not possible. Nagel's radical realism runs counter to the idealism that he sees in Wittgenstein and Davidson- and the misguided view of the physicalist.

To make a case for an alternative to reductionist naturalism, Nagel suggests that we must first assume that the world is rationally intelligible all the way down. In doing this- Nagel admits he is putting himself in the same camp as the objective idealism of Plato, Schelling and Hegel. In order for an experience to be intelligible, we must postulate an underlying order. If we think we have found the ultimate explanation, then in Nagel's view, we have failed- there are always deeper depths to explore. "We are in a world not of our own making that exists anyway; if we fail to make sense of it, that reflects the necessary limitations of the current state of our understanding."

From the rationalist perspective expressed in Mind and Cosmos, we must do more than merely identify the cause of a phenomenon- we must also do more than show correlations between distinct phenomena. We seek explanation- to explain we must describe. "there would be a double-involvement of mind in the natural order in the renovated worldview that it is the task of Mind and Cosmos to make plausible to us:
"The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious being with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in therms that do not make reference to minds".

The hubris of the reductionist is the claim that the reductive naturalist world picture, which excludes the mental from the very beginning, is sufficient to explain its own generation and acceptance by conscious subjects with reason. The reductive naturalist can give us no reason to believe her own view since the very idea of reasons for belief aren't included in her austere ontology.

The reductionist rejects "mentalist, teleological, or evaluative intelligibility" as fundamental forms of understanding. Nagel suggests we look at these alternative forms of intelligibility- they make mind, meaning, and value as fundamental as matter and space-time in an account of what there is. "In envisaging such an alternative Nagel argues that we need to re-conceive of the sciences of life in such a way that they can be integrated into a reflective account of the world and our place in it as conscious, rational, persons such that it is highly probable that a temporal process could have led to the evolution of minds like ours."

Nagel is a panpsychist- he doesn't believe that it's possible that mentality emerged from the fundamentally non-mental. There must have been something proto-mental from which it emerged (Nagel also sometimes uses the phrase "proto-psychic"). Nagel rejects theistic and materialistic explanations for the development of consciousness and instead explains how consciousness could have arisen from the complexity of the natural order itself.

In Nagel's non-reductionistic naturalism, we must assume that some of the basic laws of the workings of the universe are teleological in form and do not all take the form of mechanistic causal laws. Mentality itself (or at least some proto-mentality) must be built into our understanding of the universe- its most fundamental laws must include the capacity to explain how proto-mentality led to mentality in the guise in which it is exemplified in us. Nagel suggests that at some point the universe "woke up". "He seeks a non-reductionist, non-materialist, explanation of how that could be possible that makes it intelligible that such an occurrence would be a probable development in the workings of nature. He thinks that the only way in which that is possible is by postulating some fundamental laws of nature that are teleological in form."

[Terrapin Station]

That's a lot to comment on, but briefly:

(1) I think it's a big mistake to take naturalism and/or physicalism to be somehow "riding on the coattails" of the sciences.
(2) I think it's a big mistake to see either as being focused on a desire to provide "(a) complete explanations(s)"
(3) This section "there would be a double-involvement of mind in the natural order . . . given in therms that do not make reference to minds" seems pretty gobbledygooky. It also keeps referencing explanations without analyzing explanations in the way I said is necessary, which I think is a big problem.
(4) "the reductive naturalist world picture, which excludes the mental from the very beginning, " is crap. I'm a naturalist and probably most folks would say a reductionist. I don't at all exclude the mental.
(5) "he doesn't believe that it's possible that mentality emerged from the fundamentally non-mental" is just stupid. Properties obtain in dynamic relations of matter all the time that are not present in other matter or other dynamic relations of matter. Different structures, functioning in different ways, have different properties.
(6) Teleology is garbage.

Basically, it's a bunch of crap that provides no particular reason to pay attention to Nagel.

[Count Lucanor]

This critique of reductionist naturalism is similar to Nagel's critique of what he labeled "physicalism" in his book The View from Nowhere. This critique is grounded in Nagel's radical realism.

So far, it looks like this dude Nagel is nothing close to a realist, actually he seems to be more like an idealist with traces of epistemological agnosticism.

Nagel believes that because we humans are fallible, our current form of scientific understanding is inherently limited. There are things that we cannot know now because of our current way of understanding things. In his critique of physicalism "the physicalist, like the idealist, is accused of cutting reality down to size: of privileging one form of description of the world that aspires to be both comprehensive and complete." Nagel thinks that this is not possible. Nagel's radical realism runs counter to the idealism that he sees in Wittgenstein and Davidson- and the misguided view of the physicalist.

It is precisely because of the advances of scientific understanding, that we can grasp the true dimension of our fallibility. Scientific ignorance is often mixed in the recipe of know-it-all dogmas. Again, he doesn't run counter to idealism, he rides along with it, promoting another version of the God of the Gaps.

To make a case for an alternative to reductionist naturalism, Nagel suggests that we must first assume that the world is rationally intelligible all the way down. In doing this- Nagel admits he is putting himself in the same camp as the objective idealism of Plato, Schelling and Hegel. In order for an experience to be intelligible, we must postulate an underlying order. If we think we have found the ultimate explanation, then in Nagel's view, we have failed- there are always deeper depths to explore. "We are in a world not of our own making that exists anyway; if we fail to make sense of it, that reflects the necessary limitations of the current state of our understanding."

In what sense this method differs significantly from the materialistic point of view? Scientist don't usually think they have found "the ultimate explanation", or that they have solved the complete puzzle. They just accept what the evidence shows so far about the universe and depart from there, making assumptions from the known parts of the puzzle, as to what the missing parts may be.

From the rationalist perspective expressed in Mind and Cosmos, we must do more than merely identify the cause of a phenomenon- we must also do more than show correlations between distinct phenomena. We seek explanation- to explain we must describe. "there would be a double-involvement of mind in the natural order in the renovated worldview that it is the task of Mind and Cosmos to make plausible to us:
"The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious being with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in therms that do not make reference to minds".

Is this a rationalist perspective? If these are really Nagel's views, they make a lot of leaps of faith. How does he know that minds are "fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments"? This is not consistent with someone that proclaims he has a problem with "ultimate explanations".

The hubris of the reductionist is the claim that the reductive naturalist world picture, which excludes the mental from the very beginning, is sufficient to explain its own generation and acceptance by conscious subjects with reason. The reductive naturalist can give us no reason to believe her own view since the very idea of reasons for belief aren't included in her austere ontology.

This is plain false. Where and when did naturalism exclude the mental from the world picture? I guess he wants to say: exclude "spirits".

Nagel is a panpsychist- he doesn't believe that it's possible that mentality emerged from the fundamentally non-mental. There must have been something proto-mental from which it emerged (Nagel also sometimes uses the phrase "proto-psychic"). Nagel rejects theistic and materialistic explanations for the development of consciousness and instead explains how consciousness could have arisen from the complexity of the natural order itself.

In Nagel's non-reductionistic naturalism, we must assume that some of the basic laws of the workings of the universe are teleological in form and do not all take the form of mechanistic causal laws. Mentality itself (or at least some proto-mentality) must be built into our understanding of the universe- its most fundamental laws must include the capacity to explain how proto-mentality led to mentality in the guise in which it is exemplified in us. Nagel suggests that at some point the universe "woke up". "He seeks a non-reductionist, non-materialist, explanation of how that could be possible that makes it intelligible that such an occurrence would be a probable development in the workings of nature. He thinks that the only way in which that is possible is by postulating some fundamental laws of nature that are teleological in form."

Thus, confirming that he's no realist, but a good old idealist.

[Consul]

Thus, confirming that he's no realist, but a good old idealist.

QUOTE>
"The view that rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order makes me, in a broad sense, an idealist—not a subjective idealist, since it doesn’t amount to the claim that all reality is ultimately appearance—but an objective idealist in the tradition of Plato and perhaps also of certain post-Kantians, such as Schelling and Hegel, who are usually called absolute idealists. I suspect that there must be a strain of this kind of idealism in every theoretical scientist: pure empiricism is not enough."
(p. 17)

"I believe the weight of evidence favors some form of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism."
(pp. 4-5)

"[T]he ideal of intelligibility demands that we take seriously the alternative of a reductive answer to the constitutive question—an answer that accounts for the relation between mind and brain in terms of something more basic about the natural order. If such an account were possible, it would explain the appearance of mental life at complex levels of biological organization by means of a general monism according to which the constituents of the universe have properties that explain not only its physical but its mental character. Tom Sorell states the point clearly:
—
Even if the mechanisms that produced biological life, including consciousness, are, at some level, the same as those that operate in the evolution of the physical universe, it does not follow that those mechanisms are physical just because physical evolution preceded biological evolution. Perhaps some transphysical and transmental concept is required to capture both mechanisms. This conjecture stakes out a territory for something sometimes called “neutral monism” in addition to dualist, materialist, and idealist positions.
[T. Sorrell, Descartes Reinvented, Cambridge UP, 2005, p. 95]
—
Sorell is here using “neutral monism” to designate not just a metaphysical position but a type of systematic explanatory theory distinct from traditional materialism. Considered just metaphysically, as an answer to the mind-body problem, monism holds that certain physical states of the central nervous system are also necessarily states of consciousness —their physical description being only a partial description of them, from the outside, so to speak. Consciousness is in that case not, as in the emergent account, an effect of the brain processes that are its physical conditions; rather, those brain processes are in themselves more than physical, and the incompleteness of the physical description of the world is exemplified by the incompleteness of their purely physical description.

But since conscious organisms are not composed of a special kind of stuff, but can be constructed, apparently, from any of the matter in the universe, suitably arranged, it follows that this monism will be universal. Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical—that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental. However, the sense in which they are mental is so far exhausted by the claim that they are such as to provide a reductive account of how their appropriate combinations necessarily constitute conscious organisms of the kind we are familiar with. Any further consequences of their more-than-physical character at the microlevel remain unspecified by this abstract proposal."
(pp. 56-8)

(Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

QUOTE>
…
"…But since conscious organisms are not composed of a special kind of stuff, but can be constructed, apparently, from any of the matter in the universe, suitably arranged, it follows that this monism will be universal. Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical—that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental. However, the sense in which they are mental is so far exhausted by the claim that they are such as to provide a reductive account of how their appropriate combinations necessarily constitute conscious organisms of the kind we are familiar with. Any further consequences of their more-than-physical character at the microlevel remain unspecified by this abstract proposal."
(pp. 56-8)

(Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.)<QUOTE

By the way, it's inadequate to call the view that "[e]verything…is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical" neutral monism unless those psychophysical elements are emergent from or reducible to elements having a nature that is neither mental nor physical, since that's what "neutral" means in this context. The view that the elements of reality have a dual nature that is both fundamentally mental and fundamentally physical is neither neutralistic nor monistic, actually being a version of psychophysical dualism.

[Sy Borg]

We have 2 ways of understanding ourselves- and there is a tension between these two ways. 1. We think of ourselves as conscious subjects who have a rational nature and who engage with value. 2.We think of ourselves as part of the natural order. Natural order- a conception of nature that exists independently of us. We claim to know nature via different forms of understanding- science being one of those forms.

I would say we think of ourselves as conscious subjects with a rational nature but we are constantly being coerced into do that which we don't actually want to do. This applies from the individual level to humanity as a whole.

It's fascinating to stand back and look at what humans do. We are compelled by the survival instinct to gather in groups that are too crowded for graceful living. Societies that lived in a laid-back way, who didn't congregate in vast numbers, were swamped and destroyed by more dense, aggressive and competitive societies. It has always been this way.

Evolution doesn't care if you are happy, just as long as you live long enough to pass on your genetic material. It's clear to me that the biosphere is re-forming, possibly the most profound reformation since the great oxygenation event caused by blue-green algae. Like a metamorphosing insect, we appear to be shifting from a consumptive stage to a fecund one (hint: whatever send Earth's "seeds" to the cosmos will be be recognisably human, if human at all).

As for human minds. Compared with the minds of the future, current human minds are trivial things anyway, nothing too much to fuss about. Before long, our minds will be akin to those of chimps and dogs to advanced AI (or AI cyborgs - that depends on whether AI achieves sentience). Evolution has no end state as far as anyone can tell. It may be possible that consciousness will need to be quashed in future successful beings. Some animals lose sight or smell, and apparently koalas have regressed mentally from their more complex ancestors. So, like the famous Paperclip maximiser, perhaps what humans either become or create will be especially potent in a practical sense but with minimal qualia, or possibly even none.

In short, to understand humanity we need to philosophically ground us as a (small) part of the biosphere, which is part of the Earth. We humans are dominated and controlled by these larger natural systems in ways that are both obvious and subtle. So the value in #1 is social and practical, but it's no more reality than the thin bands of light and sound detected by of senses. In terms of evolution, individuals don't need to access reality, only enough of it to survive and breed.

By contrast, #2 is our broader existential situation.

[Hereandnow]

Count Lucanor
This is plain false. Where and when did naturalism exclude the mental from the world picture? I guess he wants to say: exclude "spirits".

Not spirits, but an account that does set a conscious "event" apart from the materialist theory that would describe it. An ontology of materialism is reductive, therefore takes the one and explains it with the other, thereby reducing it to something else. This can work in matters where beliefs and their ideas belie some recognized fact, as in psychoanalytic reduction of ones fears to, say, a traumatic event, dispelling the errors in beliefs once disillusionment does its work; but in philosophy, attempts to reduce are always simply bad arguments because they they are selective in what they theorize about. All thinking is like this. I can't think about particle physics while I am thinking about biological distinctions between species, but surely the latter is really "all about" the former and vice versa.
Look at it like this. Primordial ideas like materialism are actually not primordial at all; they are interpretative classifications equally primordial to others. You cannot reduce biology to physics for they take up world disclosure in different ways. A particle physics description of biology would simply be particle physics, if it could be done. The same is true for trying to reduce ideas, emotions, intentions, cognition, and so forth, to materialiality. There may be "material" in all things, BUT" wait...what is material, again?? You see, its just a vacuous, question begging term referring one inevitably, not to unification, but difference.

[anonymous66]

For what it's worth- here is Nagel on consciousness- p.35 of Mind and Cosmos-

Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science. The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture. Yet it is very difficult to imagine viable alternatives.

Let me begin with a brief history of what has brought us to our present predicament. The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand—how this physical world appears to human perception—were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the uman mind—as well as human intentions and purposes—from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.

However, the exclusion of everything mental from the scope of modern physical science was bound to be challenged eventually. We humans are parts of the world, and the desire for a unified world picture is irrepressible. It seems natural to pursue that unity by extending the reach of physics and chemistry, in light of their great successes in explaining so much of the natural order. These successes have so far taken the form of reduction followed by reconstruction: discovering the basic elements of which everything is composed and showing how they combine to yield the complexity we observe.

It has become clear that our bodies and central nervous systems are parts of the physical world, composed of the same elements as everything else and completely describable in terms of the modern versions of the primary qualities—more sophisticated but still mathematically and spatiotemporally defined. Molecular biology keeps increasing our knowledge of our own physical composition, operation, and development. Finally, so far as we can tell, our mental lives, including our subjective experiences, and those of other creatures are strongly connected with and probably strictly dependent on physical events in our brains and on the physical interaction of our bodies with the rest of the physical world.

Perhaps it is these developments in neurophysiology and molecular biology that have encouraged the hope of including the mind in a single physical conception of the world; at any rate, the consensus in that direction is recent. Descartes thought it couldn’t be done—that mind and matter are both fully real and irreducibly distinct, though they interact. In the dualist view, physical science is defined by the exclusion of the mental from its subject matter. There has always been resistance to dualism, but for several centuries after Descartes, it expressed itself primarily through idealism, the view that mind is the ultimate reality and the physical world is in some way reducible to it. This attempt to overcome the division from the direction of the mental extends from Berkeley—who rejected the primary-secondary quality distinction and held that physical things are ideas in the mind of God—to the logical positivists, who analyzed the physical world as a construction out of sense data. Then, in a rapid historical shift whose causes are somewhat obscure, idealism was largely displaced in later twentieth-century analytic philosophy by attempts at unification in the opposite direction, starting from the physical.

Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing. This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded. The assumption is that physics is philosophically unproblematic, and the main target of opposition is Descartes’ dualist picture of the ghost in the machine. The task is to come up with an alternative, and here begins a series of failures.

One strategy for putting the mental into the physical world picture is conceptual behaviorism, offered as an analysis of the real nature of mental concepts. This was tried in several versions. Mental phenomena were identified variously with behavior, behavioral dispositions, or forms of behavioral organization. In another version, associated with Ryle and inspired by Wittgenstein,1 mental phenomena were not identified with anything, either physical or nonphysical; the names of mental states and processes were said not to be referring expressions. Instead, mental concepts were explained in terms of their observable behavioral conditions of application—behavioral criteria or assertability conditions rather than behavioral truth conditions.

All these strategies are essentially verificationist, i.e., they assume that all that needs to be said about the content of a mental statement is what would verify or confirm it, or warrant its assertion, from the point of view of an observer. In one way or another, they reduce mental attributions to the externally observable conditions on the basis of which we attribute mental states to others. If successful, this would obviously place the mind comfortably in the physical world.

It is certainly true that mental phenomena have behavioral manifestations, which supply our main evidence for them in other creatures. Yet all these theories seem insufficient as nalyses of the mental because they leave out something essential that lies beyond the externally observable grounds for attributing mental states to others, namely, the aspect of mental phenomena that is evident from the first-person, inner point of view of the conscious subject: for example, the way sugar tastes to you or the way red looks or anger feels, each of which seems to be something more than the behavioral responses and discriminatory capacities that these experiences explain. Behaviorism leaves out the inner mental state itself.

In the 1950s an alternative, nonanalytic route to materialism was proposed, one that in a sense acknowledged that the mental is something inside us, of which outwardly observable behavior is merely a manifestation. This was the psycho-physical identity theory, offered by U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart2 not as conceptual analysis but as a scientific hypothesis. It held that mental events are physical events in the brain: Ψ = Φ (where Ψ is a mental event like pain or a taste sensation and Φ is the corresponding physical event in the central nervous system). Since this is not a conceptual truth, it cannot be known a priori; it is supposed to be a theoretical identity, like “Water = H2O,” and can be confirmed only by the future development of science.

The trouble is that this nonanalytic identity raises a further question: What is it about Φ that makes it also Ψ? It must be some property conceptually distinct from the physical properties that define Φ. That is required for the identity to be a scientific and not a conceptual truth.3 Clearly materialists won’t want to give a dualist answer—i.e., that Φ is Ψ because it has a nonphysical property in addition to its physiological ones (e.g., a nonphysical experiential quality). But they have to give some answer, and it has to be an answer that is consistent with materialism. So defenders of the identity theory, in spite of their wish to avoid relying on conceptual analysis, tended to be pulled back into different kinds of analytical behaviorism, in order to analyze the mental character of brain processes in a way that avoided dualism. What makes the brain process a mental process, they proposed, is not an additional intrinsic property but a relational one—a relation to physical behavior.

A causal element was now added to the analysis: “the inner state that typically causes certain behavior and is caused by certain stimuli.” This was prompted by the need to explain the two distinct nonsynonymous references to the same thing that occur in a non-conceptual identity statement. Materialists had to explain how “pain” and “brain state” can refer to the same thing even though their meaning is not the same, and to explain this without appealing to anything nonphysical in accounting for the reference of “pain.”4

These strategies have taken increasingly sophisticated form, under the headings of causal behaviorism, functionalism, and other theories of how mental concepts could refer to states of the brain in virtue of the causal role of those states in controlling the interaction between the organism and its environment. But all such strategies are unsatisfactory for the same old reason: even with the brain added to the picture, they clearly leave out something essential, without which there would be no mind. And what they leave out is just what was deliberately left out of the physical world by Descartes and Galileo in order to form the modern concept of the physical, namely, subjective appearances.

Another problem was subsequently noticed by Saul Kripke. Identity theorists took as their model for Ψ = Φ other theoretical identities like “Water = H2O” or “Heat = Molecular Motion.” But Kripke argued that those identities are necessary truths (though not conceptual and not a priori), whereas the Ψ/Φ relation appears to be contingent.5 This was the basis of Descartes’ argument for dualism. Descartes said that since we can clearly conceive of the mind existing without the physical body, and vice versa, they can’t be one thing.6

Consider “Water = H2O,” a typical scientifically discovered theoretical identity. It means that water is nothing but H2O. You can’t have H2O without water, and you don’t need anything more than H2O for water. It’s water even if there’s no one around to see, feel, or taste it. We ordinarily identify water by its perceptible qualities, but our perceptual experiences aren’t part of the water; they are just effects it has on our senses. The intrinsic properties of water, its density, electrical conductivity, index of refraction, liquidity between 0 and 100 degrees centigrade, etc., are all fully explained by H2O and its properties. The physical properties of H2O are by themselves sufficient for water.

So if Ψ really is Φ in this sense, and nothing else, then Φ by itself, once its physical properties are understood, should likewise be sufficient for the taste of sugar, the feeling of pain, or whatever it is supposed to be identical with. But it doesn’t seem to be. It seems conceivable, for any Φ, that there should be Φ without any experience at all. Experience of taste seems to be something extra, contingently related to the brain state—something produced rather than constituted by the brain state. So it cannot be identical to the brain state in the way that water is identical to H2O.

I have given only a brief sketch of the territory. A voluminous and intricate literature has grown up around these problems, but it serves mainly to confirm how intractable they are. The multiple dead ends in the forward march of materialism suggest that the Ψ/Φ dualism introduced at the birth of modern science may be harder to get out of than many people have imagined. It has even led some philosophers to eliminative materialism—the suggestion that mental events, like ghosts and Santa Claus, don’t exist at all.7 But if we don’t regard that as an option and still want to pursue a unified world picture, I believe we will have to leave materialism behind. Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable components of reality not describable by the physical sciences.

I suspect that the appearance of contingency in the relation between mind and brain is probably an illusion, and that it is in fact a necessary but nonconceptual connection, concealed from us by the inadequacy of our present concepts.8 Major scientific advances often require the creation of new concepts, postulating unobservable elements of reality that are needed to explain how natural regularities that initially appear accidental are in fact necessary. The evidence for the existence of such things is precisely that if they existed, they would explain what is otherwise incomprehensible.

Certainly the mind-body problem is difficult enough that we should be suspicious of attempts to solve it with the concepts and methods developed to account for very different kinds of things. Instead, we should expect theoretical progress in this area to require a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory, the introduction of electromagnetic fields into physics—or the original scientific revolution itself, which, because of its built-in restrictions, can’t result in a “theory of everything,” but must be seen as a stage on the way to a more general form of understanding. We ourselves are large-scale, complex instances of something both objectively physical from outside and subjectively mental from inside. Perhaps the basis for this identity pervades the world.

[anonymous66]

At some point in the history of the universe- sentient, conscious beings evolved. From our current vantage point, we see the evolution of a species which has a capacity for reason that is applied to understanding evolution itself. Nagel believes that reason itself gives insight into the truths of reason (this is evidence of Nagel's rationalism). Nagel has long been committed to the idea that ethics and mathematics are paradigms of objective knowledge. Nagel argues in both The Last Word and Mind and Cosmos that reason "gives us a direct and unmediated access to certain truths of reason that are plausibly to be interpreted as a priori."

With our ability to reason, we can reflect on consciousness and see what Chalmers terms as the "hard problem of consciousness" - this problem is sufficient to show the "falsity of psycho-physical reductionism about the mental." Because Nagel begins with objective forms of knowledge and seeks a reflective account of our place in the world- in Alan Thomas' view, this makes Nagel a phenomenologist- and he notes that Mind and Cosmos includes many discussions of the phenomenolgical data that can be derived from the experience of consciousness, rationality, and engagement with value. "Individual chapters of the book are devoted to consciousness, cognition and value interwoven with the exposition of Nagel's central argument. In each case, Nagel rejects a reductionist account of the form of knowledge in question."

For Nagel- it is the problem of consciousness that plays the most important role- he is seeking a speculative metaphysical foundation for the sciences of life- and the inadequacy of the views that he is criticizing is most evident when it come to the relationship between the mental and the physical. Nagel's proposed solution is neutral monism.

Nagel does show the challenges that consciousness, cognition (reason, rationality), and value (morality) pose for the reductionist and also the anti-reductionist naturalist as she constructs her alternative explanations. The explanations that Nagel seeks must answer both what Nagel calls the constitutive and the historical questions. From Mind and Cosmos- "An ahistorical constitutive account of how certain complex physical systems are also mental, and a historical account of how such systems arose in the universe from its beginnings."

Nagel is driven toward panpsychism - and notes that while it may be an adequate answer for the constitutive problem, he acknowledges that he has doubts that it can answer the historical problem- from Mind and Cosmos "{I}t is not clear that this kind of reductive explanation could really render the result intelligible... The protopsychic properties of all matter, on this view, are postulated solely because they are needed to explain the appearance of consciousness at high levels of organic complexity. Apart from that, nothing is known about them: they are completely indescribable and have no predictable local effects, in contrast to the physical properties of electrons and protons, which allow them to be detected individually."

[Terrapin Station]

Physicalism doesn't refer to the science of physics, by the way. It's certainly not subservient to the science of physics, and even supposing it were, it would be ridiculous to say that for some reason it amounts to the science of physics necessarily as it is at present.