Nagel: 'Mind & Cosmos'

 Ten years ago, Thomas Nagel published Mind & Cosmos. The subtitle is Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.

Nagel is not a theist. He does not want religious thought to influence the sciences. He does not want creationism taught in schools. He begins:

One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge.

What follows is a brief, clear demolition of the scientific outlook — it’s not really a theory; Nagel calls it a Weltanschuaung — that almost everyone assumes is true.

The “almost certainly false” is generous. This outlook has reached dead ends.

The outlook involves many things: a hierarchy of the sciences — physics, chemistry and biology — and an effort to unify their findings; a materialist conception of what exists, what’s real; an account of how matter behaves through the theories of relativity and of quantum mechanics; an account of how living things change through evolution, as presented by Darwin and developed through our understanding of the chemical structure of genetic material.

But real theories are useful. They explain things. But this view has limits. It does not, and apparently cannot, explain some of the most interesting questions about the cosmos.

For example, our almost universally accepted outlook can’t do anything with the mind-body problem, how it is that we humans and other purely materialistic beings experience consciousness or awareness.

Another limitation of the view is that it doesn’t say much about how life emerged from matter. The current explanation involves an almost infinite series of accidents. That kind of explanation has to be a provisional explanation — a place to start. You’d expect scientists to examine those accidents and elucidate them. But if you’re decades into the inquiry and have made no progress it makes sense to ask whether a near infinite series of accidents is any kind of an explanation at all.

The alternative is to back up and re-examine the underlying assumptions and logical groundwork.

The laws of the sciences, as we humans have formulated them, are not teleological for completely understandable historical reasons. If the answer to every scientific problem is “God designed it that way” you don’t get past the Dark Ages.

Nagel envisions a different kind of teleology. In addition to the physical laws we’re familiar with, he asks whether there are additional laws “biased toward the marvelous.”

The teleology that I want to consider would be an explanation not only of the appearance of physical organisms but of the development of consciousness and ultimately of reason in those organisms.

There is much more to Nagel’s book. But it’s only 128 pages and it’s clear. It’s worth the time of anyone interested in science.

And, if you’re curious, this line of thought came from Christopher Cook’s comments on Spinoza. I think Spinoza’s system of thought would allow the kind of teleology that Nagel’s talking about.

• Source: Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos; Oxford University Press, 2012.