Thomas Nagel - the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable

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

read it at Google Books


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.

Thomas Nagel, a distinguished philosopher at NYU, is well known for his critique of “materialistic reductionism” as an account of the mind-body relationship. In his new and far-reaching book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel extends his attack on materialistic reductionism—which he describes as the thesis that physics provides a complete explanation of everything—well beyond the mind-body problem. He argues that evolutionary biology is fundamentally flawed and that physics also needs to be rethought—that we need a new way to do science.
Nagel’s new way is teleological—scientific explanations need to invoke goals, not just mechanistic causes. The conventional story of the emergence of modern science maintains that Galileo and Newton forever banished Aristotle’s teleology. So Mind and Cosmos is an audacious book, bucking the tide. Nagel acknowledges that he has no teleological theory of his own to offer. His job, as he sees it, is to point to a need; creative scientists, he hopes, will do the heavy lifting.
Nagel’s rejection of materialistic reductionism does not stem from religious conviction. He says that he doesn’t have a religious bone in his body. The new, teleological science he wants is naturalistic, not supernaturalistic. This point needs to be remembered, given that the book begins with kind words for proponents of intelligent design. Nagel applauds them for identifying problems in evolutionary theory, but he does not endorse their solution.
Nagel’s main goal in this book is not to argue against materialistic reductionism, but to explore the consequences of its being false. He has argued against the -ism elsewhere, and those who know their Nagel will be able to fill in the details. But new readers may be puzzled, so a little backstory may help.
In his famous 1974 article “What is it like to be a bat?” Nagel argues that current science lacks the concepts that would allow us to understand how subjective experience is possible. Present-day science can give us information about the bat’s brain, but it cannot answer the titular question of Nagel’s article—what is it like, how does it feel from the inside, to be a bat? Nagel chooses bats as his example because they have a sensory system (echolocation) that we lack. This choice makes the problem vivid, but Nagel thinks the difficulty arises at home: each of us knows what sugar tastes like, yet current science lacks the vocabulary to understand and explain what that peculiar subjective experience is like. Nagel is cautious in the bat article; he hopes that a future materialistic science might be able to do better.
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel holds that materialism can’t deliver the goods. Drawing on his bolder and more recent paper “The Psychophysical Nexus,” he now says that materialistic reductionism is false, not that we currently don’t understand how it could be true. For Nagel, perception and other psychological processes involve irreducibly subjective facts; important aspects of the mind are, therefore, forever beyond the reach of physical explanation.
This position is compatible with many doctrines that are associated with materialism. For example, Nagel doesn’t gainsay the slogan “no difference without a physical difference”—if you and I have different psychological properties, then we must be physically different. Indeed, Nagel’s position is even compatible with the idea that every mental property is identical with some physical property—for example, it may be that being in pain and being in some neurophysiological state X are identical in the same way that being made of water and being made of H₂O are identical properties. The problem, Nagel thinks, is that this identity claim, if true, cannot in principle be explained by physics. Mind and Cosmos begins with the thesis that materialistic reductionism hits a roadblock with the mind-body problem, but there are others ahead. Although Nagel has more to say about the mind-body problem than I have just outlined, the most novel part of his book, and my focus, lies elsewhere.
Evolution
Nagel believes that evolutionary biology is in trouble, but what sort of trouble is it in? There are two possibilities. Evolutionary theory could be in trouble just because it is committed to materialistic reductionism; if so, the theory would be perfectly okay if it dropped that commitment. Understood in this way, it’s the philosophy that has gone wrong, not the biology. But much of what Nagel says is not in this vein. He thinks that the biology itself is flawed. Even without a commitment to materialistic reductionism, the theory would be in bad shape. For Nagel, the combination of evolutionary theory and materialistic reductionism is false, while evolutionary theory taken on its own (without the philosophical add-on) is incomplete. Incompleteness means that the theory cannot fully explain important biological events.

For Nagel, important aspects of the mind are forever beyond the reach of physical explanation.

Here I want to consider two criticisms that Nagel makes of evolutionary theory. The first concerns probability, the second, ethics. Neither criticism depends on the idea that evolutionary theory is committed to materialistic reductionism.
Nagel thinks that adequate explanations of the origins of life, intelligence, and consciousness must show that those events had a “significant likelihood” of occurring: these origins must be shown to be “unsurprising if not inevitable.” A complete account of consciousness must show that consciousness was “something to be expected.” Nagel thinks that evolutionary theory as we now have it fails in this regard, so it needs to be supplemented.
Nagel doesn’t impose this condition of adequate explanation on all the events that science might address. He is prepared to live with the fact that some events are just flukes or accidents or improbable coincidences. For example, it may just be an improbable coincidence that in the mid-1980s Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice in the span of four months. But the existence of life, intelligence, and consciousness are not in the same category. Why do Nagel’s standards go up when he contemplates facts that he deems “remarkable”? Maybe the answer falls under what Nagel refers to, in a different context, as his “ungrounded intellectual preference.” It isn’t theistic conviction that is doing the work here, but rather Nagel’s faith that the remarkable facts he mentions must be “intelligible,” where intelligibility requires that these facts had a significant probability of being true.
My philosophical feelings diverge from Nagel’s. I think that Beethoven’s existence is remarkable, but I regard it as a fluke. He could easily have failed to exist. Indeed, my jaded complacency about Beethoven scales up. I don’t think that life, intelligence, and consciousness had to be in the cards from the universe’s beginning. I am happy to leave this question to the scientists. If they tell me that these events were improbable, I do not shake my head and insist that the scientists must be missing something. There is no such must. Something can be both remarkable and improbable.
Moreover, if an improbable state of affairs comes to pass, this does not mean that the state of affairs is unintelligible. Consider: mom and dad have two daughters. Why are both children female? A simple Mendelian answer is that all of mom’s eggs had an X chromosome while half of dad’s sperm had an X and half had a Y. The process of fertilization randomly combines an egg from mom with a sperm from dad. This means that the chance of a daughter is 1/2, so the chance of two daughters is 1/4. We explain the two-daughter outcome not by showing that it was to be expected, but by elucidating the process that produced the outcome with a certain probability. Before you insist that the Mendelian story doesn’t really explain the outcome, reflect on whether you think that the Mendelian story sheds no light at all on why the parents had two daughters. Surely it does not leave us totally in the dark.
In thinking about Nagel’s probability argument, we need to be careful about which facts we are considering. The fact that life on earth started some 3.8 billion years ago, and that intelligence and consciousness made their terrestrial appearances more recently—this is a local fact about our planet, and maybe it was very improbable, given how the universe got started. But consider the more global fact that the universe contains life and intelligence and consciousness at some time in its total history. What’s the probability of that, given the universe’s initial state? Science doesn’t really have much of a clue (yet), but this gap in our present knowledge does not show that fundamental presuppositions of the sciences need rethinking. After all, conventional science does tell us that the universe is a very big place with lots of planets that are about as close to their stars as our planet is to the sun. Maybe life and intelligence and consciousness had a high probability of arising (someplace and sometime, not necessarily on earth in the last 3.8 billion years). If this global fact is the remarkable fact that Nagel has in mind, he should not conclude that biology needs to be supplied with new organizing principles. Do not confuse the proposition that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice in four months with the proposition that someone won some state lottery or other twice, at some time or other. The first was very improbable, the second much less so.
Before leaving the topic of probability, I want to highlight what is involved in Nagel’s requirement that the facts he says are remarkable must be shown to be unsurprising. For the sake of concreteness, let’s take this to mean that the probability must be greater than 1/2. Suppose that to get from the universe’s first moment to the origin of consciousness, 200 stages must be traversed. The universe starts at stage S1, then it needs to pass to S2, then to S3, and so on, until it reaches S200, at which time consciousness makes its first appearance. Suppose further that we have a theory that says that the probability of going from each of these stages to the next is 99/100: this means that each individual step is very likely. Still, the probability of going from S1 all the way to S200 is (99/100)¹⁹⁹, or about 1/10. The demand that the origin of consciousness must have had a probability greater than 1/2 entails that the theory I just described must be wrong or seriously incomplete.
I agree that it might be wrong or incomplete, but this is not because it violates Nagel’s demand that we must show remarkable facts to be likely. In addition, I think that a theory of this sort could shed considerable light on why consciousness arose. It doesn’t show that the event was to be expected, given the universe’s initial state. Instead, if true, it elucidates the step-wise process that produced the outcome we observe. When a theory says that X was improbable, this does not mean that the theory says that X is unintelligible: the final result could be improbable even though each step in the process was highly likely.

The words ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ do not occur in theories in physics, yet you and I have beliefs and desires.

What makes more sense than Nagel’s probability requirement is one about possibility—that an adequate theory must allow that the origin of life, mind, and consciousness all were possible, given the initial state of the universe. If this were all that Nagel meant by his claim that “the propensity for the development of organisms with a subjective point of view must have been there from the beginning,” I would have no quarrel. But then there would be no objection to the sciences we now have.
Not only does Nagel require that remarkable facts be fairly probable; he also insists that they can’t be byproducts (a.k.a. side effects). He applies this requirement to the appearance of minds, consciousness, and reasoning. Nagel doesn’t reject all byproduct explanations. For example, he is comfortable with the standard evolutionary account of why vertebrate blood is red. This didn’t happen because there was an adaptive advantage in having red blood. Rather, the hemoglobin molecule was selected because it transports oxygen to tissues, and hemoglobin just happens to make our blood red. And it isn’t only useless traits such as the color of blood that evolutionary biology says are byproducts. Sea turtles use their limbs to dig nests in the sand when they come out of the water to lay their eggs, but the tetrapod arrangement evolved long before turtles developed this behavior. Being able to build nests in sand is a side effect. Evolution often recruits old structures to new uses.
Evolutionary biology leaves open the possibility that even Nagel’s remarkable facts are byproducts. For instance, the co-discoverers of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, disagreed about how the human capacity for abstract theoretical reasoning should be explained. Darwin saw it as a byproduct. There was selection for reasoning well in situations that made a difference for survival and reproduction, and our capacity to reason about mathematics and natural science and philosophy is a happy byproduct. Wallace, on the other hand, thought that a spiritualistic explanation was needed. Nagel finds Darwin’s side effect account “very far-fetched,” but he does not say why.
I now turn to Nagel’s second reason for thinking that something is seriously amiss with current evolutionary theory. Nagel is what philosophers call a “moral realist.” This doesn’t mean he has the cynicism of a Humphrey Bogart character. It means he thinks that some statements about right and wrong are true and that what makes them true isn’t anyone’s say-so. Nor are they made true by the fact that we would come to believe them if we engaged in a certain type of deliberation. For Nagel, the statement that causing suffering is bad is like the statement that the Rocky Mountains are more than 10,000 feet tall—both are true independently of whether anyone thinks they are true. Nagel thinks “moral realism is incompatible with a Darwinian account of the evolutionary influence on our faculties of moral and evaluative judgment.” He resolves the conflict as follows: “since moral realism is true, a Darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false.”
Why does Nagel think that evolutionary theory conflicts with moral realism? His reasoning is based on Occam’s razor, the principle of parsimony. It seems pretty clear that some of our psychological capacities evolved because they provided our ancestors with reliable information about the world they inhabited. Perceptual beliefs are the clearest example. Our ability to use our sensory systems to form beliefs about our immediate surroundings evolved because the beliefs they generated were largely true. Nagel thinks that no such explanation can be offered for why we have the moral beliefs we have. Indeed, biologists don’t often make such offers. For example, Darwin argued that moral norms enjoining altruistic behavior are now widespread in human societies because groups that internalized and complied with these norms outcompeted groups that did not. Whether it is true that we ought to act altruistically isn’t something that Darwin or more recent biologists need to take a stand on to explain why people accept such norms.
Okay, you may be thinking, why is the evolutionary explanation of our moral beliefs an argument against moral realism? Here you need to reach for your razor. Nagel’s idea is that if you don’t need to postulate the existence of moral facts to explain why we have the moral beliefs we have, then you should slice those alleged facts away. This doesn’t just mean that you should decline to believe that there are moral facts of the sort that moral realism postulates. It means that you should believe that there are no such things. The razor doesn’t tell you to suspend judgment; it tells you to deny. That is Nagel’s reason for thinking that there is a conflict between evolutionary theory and moral realism: evolutionary theory underwrites a parsimony argument against moral realism.
I don’t buy this argument. I agree that you don’t need to postulate moral truths to have an evolutionary explanation for why we have the moral beliefs we do. But that doesn’t mean that evolutionary theory justifies denying that there are such truths. Nagel is assuming that if moral realism is true, then the truth of moral propositions must be part of the explanation for why we believe those propositions. I disagree; the point of ethics is to guide our behavior, not to explain it, a thesis that Nagel defended in The View from Nowhere (1989) but has now apparently abandoned.

Nagel demands that we show remarkable facts to be likely, but Beethoven is remarkable, and he could easily have failed to exist.

I said before that Nagel thinks evolutionary theory, shorn of its commitment to materialistic reductionism, is incomplete, not false. Nagel’s probability argument conforms to this pattern, but his argument about ethics does not, at least not when it involves a claim of incompatibility. If evolutionary theory and moral realism are incompatible and moral realism is true, then what follows is that evolutionary theory is false, not that it is incomplete. This suggests that we should set this talk of incompatibility to one side. Nagel’s considered position is that evolutionary theory, construed as proposing a complete explanation of why we have the moral convictions we have, would conflict with moral realism. The upshot is that something needs to be added to the evolutionary explanation.
Teleology
So Nagel thinks that an adequate scientific account of the existence of life, mind, and consciousness must show that those events had significant probabilities. He holds that current science does not do that and therefore needs to be supplemented. But with what? Nagel’s answer is that science should go teleological: concepts of goal and purpose need to be used in new scientific theories. This suggestion conflicts with the dominant scientific tradition of Galileo, Newton, and their successors. Teleology is the most radical idea in Nagel’s book.
Nagel says that teleology means that “things happen because they are on a path that leads to certain outcomes.” Suppose that X caused Y and that Y then caused Z. A teleological explanation of Y will say that it occurred because it was on the path from X to Z. This explanation of Y cites Z, which occurs later than Y. However, the teleological explanation does not say that the later event caused the earlier one; for Nagel, teleological explanations are non-causal. In addition, Nagel wants a naturalistic and non-intentional teleology, one that does not involve God or any other intelligent designer directing the universe toward a goal.
According to Nagel a teleological theory says that things tend to change in the direction of certain types of outcome. This is right, but, as Nagel realizes, it isn’t sufficient for a theory to be teleological. The second law of thermodynamics says that closed chambers of gas tend to evolve in the direction of increasing entropy, but that doesn’t mean that they are goal-directed systems. Nagel also says that conventional (non-teleological) physics describes “how each state of the universe evolved from its immediate predecessor,” but a teleological science will be different: “teleology requires that [some] successor states . . . have a significantly higher probability than is entailed by the laws of physics alone.” Whether or not this is a necessary condition for teleology, it too is insufficient. Suppose I buy a lottery ticket on Monday, win the lottery on Tuesday, and splurge on luxury goods and big charitable donations on Wednesday. The probability of my winning on Tuesday, given that I bought the ticket on Monday, is low, but the probability that I win on Tuesday, given that I bought the ticket on Monday and was a big spender on Wednesday, is much higher. This isn’t teleological, however, since it isn’t true that my spending on Wednesday explains why I won the day before.
I do not reject teleology wholesale. I do not reject claims such as “flowers have bright petals because they attract pollinators” and “Sally went to the park at 8:30 because there were fireworks at 9 o’clock.” These statements do not say that a later event caused an earlier one, but they are true because certain causal facts are in place. The statement about flowers is true because there was selection for bright colors among plants that gained from the services of pollinators that used color vision. The statement about fireworks is true because Sally knew there would be fireworks at 9 o’clock, and she wanted to arrive in time to get a good seat. Maybe there are true teleological statements about life, mind, or consciousness. But if there are causal underpinnings for those teleological statements, as there are for the teleological statements about flowers and fireworks, the materialist need not object.
Nagel’s thesis is not just that there are true teleological statements about the emergence of life, mind, and consciousness, but that these statements cannot be explained by a purely causal/materialistic science. Only then does his teleology go beyond what materialistic reductionism allows. I see no reason to think that there are true teleological statements of this sort. If readers are to take seriously the possibility of teleological explanations that are both true and causally inexplicable, it would help if Nagel identified some modest phenomenon that clearly has that sort of explanation. He never does. That raises the worry that the kind of explanation for which Nagel hankers is a pipe dream.
Nagel wants a teleological science partly because he is moved by probability considerations. If conventional science says that remarkable facts had low probabilities, given what came before, the probabilities of these facts can be boosted by adding information about what came after. In this respect, the emergence of life resembles my winning the lottery on Tuesday. Each event is quite probable, given what happened later. The problem is why we should regard that as an explanation.
Anti-Reductionism
Nagel is hardly unique in being an anti-reductionist. Most philosophers nowadays would probably say that they are against reductionism.
What sets Nagel apart is his idea that current biological and physical theories need to be fundamentally overhauled. Why do other anti-reductionists decline to take this radical step? It is not that they are faint of heart. Mostly they decline because they endorse the following picture. When an organism has a new visual experience, the physical state of the organism has changed. And when an economy goes into recession, the physical state of that social object also has changed. These examples obey the slogan I mentioned before: no difference without a physical difference.

That science should go teleological—incorporate concepts of goal and purpose—is a radical idea.

However, when it comes to understanding visual perception and economic change, the best explanations are not to be found in relativity theory or quantum mechanics. Sciences outside of physics can explain things that physics is not equipped to explain. But this doesn’t mean that physics needs to be revised. The philosophers and scientists I am describing disagree with Nagel’s claim that evolution is more than a physical process, though they agree that physics is not the best tool to use in understanding evolution.
Brute Facts
A true and well-confirmed causal statement such as “smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer” calls for explanation. We want to know how inhaling the smoke causes the tumor to grow. If someone said that this causal statement is just a brute fact—that it is true but has no explanation—we would raise our eyebrows. When one event causes another, we expect there to be intervening events. We explain why C causes E by showing that C causes I1, that I1 causes I2, and so on, up to some further I that causes E.
But materialism should not assume that this must always be the case; maybe there are occasions where C causes E without there being an intervening event between C and E. Materialism should be open to the possibility that some causal relationships are brute facts. This is one reason to be suspicious of the view that Nagel calls materialistic reductionism—that physics provides a complete explanation of everything. Scientists already leave room for brute facts in another context. When they say that a law is “fundamental,” they mean that it can’t be explained by anything deeper.
If there can be brute facts about purely physical causation, why can’t there be brute facts about physical events having mental effects? Suppose event C is the hammer hitting your thumb and E is the pain you feel. Science explains why C caused E by interpolating causes. The chain of events that goes from C to E passes (perhaps gradually) from the physical to the mental. The idea that there can’t be brute facts about physical-to-mental causation is just as misguided as the idea that there can’t be brute facts about physical-to-physical causation.
Nagel writes, “All explanations come to an end.” This could point to a practical matter: when we run out of time or patience, we settle for what we have. But the limitation may also be forced on us by the world. Maybe there are brute causal facts. Maybe some scientific laws are fundamental. And maybe some crucial facts about the mind-body relation are brute as well. Not that we should be complacent. If smoking causes lung cancer, it makes sense to expect that there is an explanation as to why. But we should not over-generalize, turning a good heuristic into a metaphysical principle that brooks no exceptions. Whereas the materialistic reductionism that Nagel criticizes says that everything has a complete physical explanation, a more circumspect materialism would assert that everything that has an explanation has a complete physical explanation.
Mind and Cosmos is dominated by a set of very strong assumptions about explanation: remarkable facts must have explanations; those explanations must show that the remarkable facts have fairly high probabilities; and remarkable facts cannot be byproducts. Nagel does not take seriously the possibility that the world may not be so obliging.• • •
Current science may suffer from fundamental flaws, but Nagel has not made a convincing case that this is so. And even if there are serious explanatory defects in our world picture, I don’t see how Nagel’s causally inexplicable teleology can be a plausible remedy. In saying this, I realize that Nagel is trying to point the way to a scientific revolution and that my reactions may be mired in presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend. If Nagel is right, our descendants will look back on him as a prophet—a prophet whom naysayers such as me were unable to recognize. -  Elliott Sober

As I’ve mentioned before, the respected philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel has joined the ranks of Darwin-dissers with the publication of his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. I am eager to read this, but haven’t yet had a chance because I’m travelling and reading Sophisticated Theology™ (this book may qualify in that genre).
Nagel has always evinced a sympathy for Intelligent Design creationism, and in fact he chose Stephen Meyer’s ID book Signature in the Cell as his “book of the year” in the respected Times Literary Supplement (read the letters following Nagel’s endorsement at the link).  But Nagel is no slouch academically, and so it’s very surprising that he joins his colleague Jerry Fodor in bashing Darwin at book length.
In the latest issue of The Nation, Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg review Nagel’s new book. Their verdict isn’t pretty.

Nagel’s is the latest in what has become a small cottage industry involving a handful of prominent senior philosophers expressing skepticism about aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Some, like the overtly Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, have made a career of dialectical ingenuity in support of the rationality of religious faith. Others, such as Jerry Fodor, are avowed atheists like Nagel, and have only tried to raise challenges to discrete aspects of evolutionary explanations for biological phenomena. Plantinga’s influence has largely been limited to other religious believers, while Fodor’s challenge was exposed rather quickly by philosophers as trading on confusions (even Nagel disowns it in a footnote). Nagel now enters the fray with a far-reaching broadside against Darwin and materialism worthy of the true-believing Plantinga (whom Nagel cites favorably). We suspect that philosophers—even philosophers sympathetic to some of Nagel’s concerns—will be disappointed by the actual quality of the argument.

Nagel not only attacks evolution and materialism, but, after touting Stephen Meyer, now gives encomiums to the unctuous Alvin Plantinga!  One wonders if Nagel is losing his critical abilities, or simply is plagued by a nagging desire to go to church.

A good philosopher gone bad

Weisberg and Leiter do agree, though, with one of Nagel’s beefs—the notion that reductionism is overrated:

Nagel opposes two main components of the “materialist” view inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The first is what we will call theoretical reductionism, the view that there is an order of priority among the sciences, with all theories ultimately derivable from physics and all phenomena ultimately explicable in physical terms. We believe, along with most philosophers, that Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phenomena in terms unrecognizable by physics. As the philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher pointed out some thirty years ago, even classical genetics has not been fully reduced to molecular genetics, and that reduction would have been wholly within one field. We simply do not see any serious attempts to reduce all the “higher” sciences to the laws of physics.

Here all three academics (Weisberg is a philosopher; Leiter a professor of law) make a mistake: the view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics, which is materialism, is not identical to an attempt to reduce all sciences to physics.  The former must be true unless you’re religious, while the latter is a tactical problem that will be solved to some degree as we understand more about physics and biology, but is unlikely in our lifetime to give a complete explanation for higher-level phenomena. Remember, though, that “emergent phenomena” must be consistent with the laws of physics, even those laws may not be useful for explaining things like natural selection.
And, of course, more and more phenomena are being explained by physics. That’s what physical chemistry is all about, and even some aspects of natural selection (e.g., why eyes and ears evolved as they do) depend on knowing principles of physics.
But never mind. Nagel’s target appears to be naturalism, and his method similar to that of Plantinga, who believes that natural selection could never have given humans the ability to seek out and discover truths about nature:

The second component of the thesis Nagel opposes is what we will call naturalism, the view that features of our world—including “consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value”—can ultimately be accounted for in terms of the natural processes described by the various sciences (whether or not they are ever “reduced” to physics). Nagel’s arguments here are aimed at a more substantial target, although he gives us few specifics about the kind of naturalism he opposes. He does characterize it as the attempt to explain everything “at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology,” and the one named proponent of this view is the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Although Dennett would not characterize his project as trying to explain everything at the “most basic level,” he does aim to show that phenomena such as consciousness, purpose and thought find a natural home in a picture of human beings inspired by Darwin. In the absence of any clearer statement of the argument, we will assume that this is the so-called “neo-Darwinian” picture that Nagel opposes.

One would assume that Nagel must be thoroughly acquainted with the evolutionary literature to make such a claim, but apparently he’s not near as savvy about our field as is Dennett:

Defending such a sweeping claim might seem to require a detailed engagement with the relevant science, yet in a striking admission early on, Nagel reveals that his book “is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist.” And a recurring objection to what he learned from his layman’s reading of popular science writing is that much science “flies in the face of common sense,” that it is inconsistent with “evident facts about ourselves, that it “require[s] us to deny the obvious,” and so on.

The authors add dryly:

This style of argument does not, alas, have a promising history.

. . and then the reviewers make a point that resonates deeply with me: materialism and naturalism need no a priori justification, but are justified by their fruits:

Happily, Nagel does not attempt to repudiate the Copernican revolution in astronomy, despite its hostility to common sense. But he displays none of the same humility when it comes to his preferred claims of common sense—the kind of humility that nearly 400 years of nonevident yet true scientific discoveries should engender. Are we really supposed to abandon a massively successful scientific research program because Nagel finds some scientific claims hard to square with what he thinks is obvious and “undeniable,” such as his confidence that his “clearest moral…reasonings are objectively valid”?
In support of his skepticism, Nagel writes: “The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.” This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos. Epistemic humility—the recognition that we could be wrong—is a virtue in science as it is in daily life, but surely we have some reason for thinking, some four centuries after the start of the scientific revolution, that Aristotle was on the wrong track and that we are not, or at least not yet. Our reasons for thinking this are obvious and uncontroversial: mechanistic explanations and an abandonment of supernatural causality proved enormously fruitful in expanding our ability to predict and control the world around us. The fruits of the scientific revolution, though at odds with common sense, allow us to send probes to Mars and to understand why washing our hands prevents the spread of disease. We may, of course, be wrong in having abandoned teleology and the supernatural as our primary tools for understanding and explaining the natural world, but the fact that “common sense” conflicts with a layman’s reading of popular science writing is not a good reason for thinking so.

I can’t resist adding this, though (and I do realize I’m quoting a lot of the piece), for the authors of the review have done a good job:

Philosophical naturalists often appeal to the metaphor of “Neurath’s Boat,” named after the philosopher who developed it. Our situation as inquirers trying to understand the world around us, according to Neurath, is like that of sailors who must rebuild their ship while at sea. These sailors do not have the option of abandoning the ship and rebuilding a new one from scratch. They must, instead, try to rebuild it piecemeal, all the time staying afloat on other parts of the ship on which they continue to depend. In epistemological terms, we are also “at sea”: we cannot abandon all the knowledge about the world we have acquired from the sciences and then ask what we really know or what is really rational. The sciences that have worked so well for us are precisely our benchmark for what we know and what is rational; they’re the things that are keeping us “afloat.” Extending this metaphor, we can say that Nagel is the sailor who says, “I know the ideal form a ship should take—it is intuitively obvious, I am confident in it—so let us jump into the ocean and start building it from scratch.”

I won’t dissect the rest of the review, or Nagel’s arguments as expressed therein, but let me add that Nagel fleshes out Plantinga’s arguments by claiming that there are indeed moral truths (if you object to Sam Harris, you must also object to Nagel), and that natural selection was impotent at giving us the ability to see them. Where do they come from, then? Nagel apparently has no idea.
I don’t think there are objective moral truths, though morality seems to be grounded on certain principles that most humans take to be true (i.e. increasing well-being is good), and it’s indubitably true that “morality” is not completely coded in our genes anyway. How could it be if those so-called “truths” have changed so drastically in the last few centuries?
In the end, Nagel calls for a revival of teleological thinking.  He’s not a believer, so I’m not sure exactly what the “driving force” of biological diversity is supposed to be.  Nor am I sure what has happened to Nagel, for he’s throwing over one of the best-established theories in science for some teleological process that he can only intuit. He appears to have caught some virus from Jerry Fodor, and if other philosophers don’t condemn Nagel’s mushy thinking, I’ll have lost a lot of respect for philosophy. For crying out loud, any average biologist can think harder about this problem than the vaunted philosopher Nagel!
Finally, here is Leiter and Weisberg’s summary of the book:

We conclude with a comment about truth in advertising. Nagel’s arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop “rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that “the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Mind and Cosmos is certainly an apt title for Nagel’s philosophical meditations, but his subtitle—”Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”—is highly misleading. Nagel, by his own admission, relies only on popular science writing and brings to bear idiosyncratic and often outdated views about a whole host of issues, from the objectivity of moral truth to the nature of explanation. No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “is almost certainly false.” The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues. Even a philosopher sympathetic to Nagel’s worries about the naturalistic worldview would not claim this volume comes close to living up to that subtitle. Its only effect will be to make the book an instrument of mischief.

Indeed: the Discovery Institute will be all over this one like ugly on a frog.
- whyevolutionistrue

As the title and subtitle make clear, Thomas Nagel's recent project is an extremely ambitious one; it is especially ambitious to attempt to tackle it in a very short book. Nagel thinks there is a wide consensus among philosophers and scientists around a certain view of nature, the 'materialist neo-Darwinian' conception, but that this view has proved radically inadequate. It has failed, Nagel argues, to provide adequate explanations for mind and for value, and these things are so central to an adequate picture of the cosmos that such failures constitute a fatal flaw. Of course, it is not just that no adequate explanation has yet been given, but rather, in Nagel's view, that there are systematic reasons for suspecting that none could be given. Nagel does not develop this argument from a religious perspective. Indeed, he makes it clear that theistic assumptions have no appeal for him. Instead, insofar as he has a positive alternative to offer, it is that we should add a measure of naturalistic teleology to our stock of explanations, a bias of nature 'towards the marvelous' (most marvelously, leading to ourselves).
I found this book frustrating and unconvincing. Much of the frustration derives from a difficulty in knowing what exactly its target is and, when this is clear, why. The subtitle offers us materialism and the neo-Darwinian conception of nature. Starting with the latter, I would have doubted that, except perhaps in the hands of Daniel Dennett, neo-Darwinism is as central to a conception of nature as the title suggests. Darwinism, neo- or otherwise, is an account of the relations between living things past and present and of their ultimate origins, full of fascinating problems in detail, but beyond any serious doubt in general outline. This lack of doubt derives not, as Nagel sometimes insinuates, from a prior commitment to a metaphysical view -- there are theistic Darwinists as well as atheistic, naturalists and supernaturalists -- but from overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources: biogeography, the fossil record, comparative physiology and genomics, and so on. Nagel offers no arguments against any of this, and indeed states explicitly that he is not competent to do so. His complaint is that there are some explanatory tasks that he thinks evolution should perform that he thinks it can't. But as far as an attack that might concern evolutionists, they will feel, to borrow the fine phrase of former British minister, Dennis Healey, as if they had been savaged by a sheep.
Materialism is something quite different. In Nagel's mind, at least, it is almost synonymous with reductionism, the term with which he most commonly refers to the views he opposes. He writes, for instance, 'I will use the terms "materialism" or "materialist naturalism" to refer to one side of this conflict, and "antireductionism" to refer to the other side' (p. 13). This reflects an earlier statement that 'among the scientists and philosophers who do express views about the natural order as a whole, reductive materialism is widely assumed to be the only serious possibility'. This is amazing stuff. The only citation in favour of this is to Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory, a somewhat ironic choice given the open disdain for philosophy Weinberg expresses in that book. But actually it is hard to think of an appropriate citation from a philosopher. Nagel expresses a view that was popular among philosophers of science half a century ago, and has been in decline ever since. It is a view that is perhaps still common among philosophers of mind (David Chalmers much discussed book The Conscious Mind (1996), for example, bases its argument for dualism on a similar view of materialism), but reductionism has been almost entirely rejected by philosophers actually engaged with the physical and biological sciences: it simply has no interesting relation to the diversity of things that scientists actually do.
So here is the first problem. Reductionism can be understood as a metaphysical thesis, typically based on an argument that if there is only material stuff in the world (no spooky stuff), then the properties of stuff must ultimately explain everything. This is a controversial thesis, much debated by philosophers. But what the last 50 years of work in the philosophy of science has established is that this kind of reductionism has little relevance to science. Even if it turned out that most scientists believed something like this (which I find incredible) this would be a psychological oddity, not a deep insight about science. A more sensible materialism goes no further than the rejection of spooky stuff: whatever kinds of stuff there may turn out to be and whatever they turn out to do, they are, as long as this turning out is empirically grounded, ipso facto not spooky. Such a materialism is quite untouched by Nagel's arguments.
Why does Nagel believe that materialism has to have this reductive character? It appears to be because he believes that 'everything about the world can . . . be understood' (p. 17), and that 'rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order'. It would not be an exaggeration to say that for Nagel, if science can't come up with a theory of everything it has, in some deep sense, failed. Nagel is thus, in effect, committed a priori to reductionism; the failure of reductionism is therefore the failure of science. Perhaps the most charitable reading of the position is that Nagel is trying to revive rationalism for an atheistic age. He doesn't, however, make it look like an encouraging project.
The main substance of the book, once this strange philosophical backdrop has been sketched, is an argument for the irreducibility to 'materialist neo-Darwinism' of consciousness, cognition and values, each of which gets a chapter. Consciousness is, of course, familiar territory for Nagel, whose classic paper 'What is it like to be a bat?' has been a major factor in the founding of the now thriving consciousness industry. Given the special status and mystery (even spookiness) attributed to consciousness within this movement, it is not surprising that it has given rise to some curious metaphysical views, most famously David Chalmers's dualism alluded to above. There are increasing stirrings of doubt about this project and even a few, like this reviewer, who doubt whether there is anything it is like to be a bat (see Hacker 2002; Dupré 2009), but this is not the place to pursue that argument. What seems to me beyond any serious question is that the results and insights gained by the vast quantities of philosophical and quasi-philosophical work on consciousness in the last few decades is hardly comparable with the successes that stand to the credit of evolution.
The starting point of Nagel's strategy is that if the general reductionist project is to be successful, then it must be shown how consciousness/cognition/value can be integrated into the materialist worldview. Prima facie these things are not material. The materialist story about how material came to possess these entities or qualities is evolution. So if evolution cannot account for consciousness/cognition/value, it is fatally injured. Let's assume for the sake of argument that we accept the philosophical framing of the issue. The next thing is to give an account of these topics that blocks the evolutionary explanation. Suffice it to say that in each case the account given is controversial. Most obviously this is true for the moral realism that Nagel defends. Here he is quite clear that the argument could also run from the truth of evolution to the falsity of moral realism, a direction taken, as Nagel notes, by Sharon Street (2006). I have already mentioned the possibility of doubts about Nagel's take on consciousness. Given the controversial status of these analyses Nagel's subtitle should at least be amended to 'why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature might possibly be false'.
The case of cognition, finally, brings out most strikingly Nagel's rationalism. Nagel thinks that reason gives us insights into reality that evolution cannot account for. Whereas perception gives us a view of the world mediated by a 'mental effect' that it causes in me, something that emerged to serve my evolutionary interests, reason gives me direct, unmediated insight into the world. If I realise that my beliefs are in contradiction, I know directly that one of them is false (p. 82). These are deep waters, no doubt. My own views are, first, that the mediating mental effect in perception is a highly problematic entity, and second that surely logic is at least mediated by language. But here I will only repeat that we have surely not been offered anything harder to deny than the general truth of evolution.
Suppose, again counterfactually, that we accept Nagel's accounts of consciousness, cognition, and value, what would it take to show that beings with these capacities could not have evolved in the "neo-Darwinian" manner? How, for instance, can a collection of molecules evolve the ability to feel like something? I'll offer just one more diagnosis of what has gone wrong. Nagel is very impressed, like many before him and since, with the oddity of material stuff having experiences. But the explanation of mind does not, of course, lie in matter but in form. Of course matter must have the capacity to embody complex forms, as for instance the properties of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other elements that allow them to form complex organic polymers. It is then the relations that these forms make possible with other molecules and then up the scale of increasing complexity that underlie the emergence of the capacities that so impress us.
What can't evolution explain about all this that it ought to? Nagel constantly asserts that to explain the existence of consciousness, etc., evolution must not just show that they are possible, but also that they are likely, or to be expected. This is, I suppose, a further expression of his rationalism, the expectation of a certain kind of intelligibility. But still it seems to me poorly motivated. At the time of my birth it was very unlikely that I would several decades later be reviewing a book by a famous philosopher; but it is not mysterious that this eventually came about. The improbability has been declining rapidly for the last few decades. Just so with evolution. The evolution of reason may well be very unlikely indeed on a young, hot planet. It's a great deal more likely by the time there are highly social, if not yet rational, multicellular organisms with very complex nervous systems.
Nagel does not want to appeal to God and finds current evolutionary thinking in principle inadequate to account for central features of human existence. Yet he is committed to the intelligibility of the world we find ourselves in. So where can we go to provide more satisfactory explanations? The only positive suggestion that Nagel offers to solve the pseudo-problems he has devised is that there may be teleological laws, laws that 'bias towards the marvelous'. What is the evidence for these strange bits of legislation? Only that they would make the appearance of complex creatures such as ourselves, marvels that we are, more likely. I have never felt more proud to be an empiricist.
A final point. I have myself argued that it is a serious mistake to allow fear of creationists and other obscurantists to discourage discussion of the weaknesses and unanswered questions in evolutionary theory. Nagel has no fear of such people and expresses a considerable sympathy with intelligent design. On the basis of his understanding of evolution, he considers that the rejection of their criticisms of evolution is 'manifestly unfair' (p. 10). (This may, of course, reflect on either the understanding or the unfairness.) He just personally feels an aversion to the theistic perspective. The title of the book, however, all too readily interpreted as announcing the falsity of Darwinism, will certainly lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism. Notwithstanding my caution about being unduly influenced by such people, this seems unfortunate when so easily avoidable.
REFERENCES
Chalmers, David (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dupré, John (2009). "Hard and Easy Questions about Consciousness", in Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P.M. S. Hacker, eds. Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 228-249.
Hacker, P. M. S. (2002). "Is there anything it is like to be a bat?". Philosophy 77: 157-174.
Street, Sharon (2006). "A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value". Philosophical Studies 127: 109-166. - John Dupré

Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy and of law at New York University, has made his reputation over the last fifty years as a leading contributor to moral and political philosophy, with occasional forays into the philosophy of mind. Most famously, and most relevant to his new book, Mind and Cosmos, he wrote an influential paper in the 1970s with the memorable title “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel tried to demonstrate the implausibility of the notion that, even if one knew all the relevant physical facts about the brains of bats, one could have any idea what it felt like to be a bat. How could the subjective feeling of this experience be captured by a set of cold, objective biological and chemical facts about neurons? Nagel’s new book revisits some of these ideas and aims to “develop the rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the “materialism and Darwinism” of our age.
Nagel’s is the latest in what has become a small cottage industry involving a handful of prominent senior philosophers expressing skepticism about aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Some, like the overtly Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, have made a career of dialectical ingenuity in support of the rationality of religious faith. Others, such as Jerry Fodor, are avowed atheists like Nagel, and have only tried to raise challenges to discrete aspects of evolutionary explanations for biological phenomena. Plantinga’s influence has largely been limited to other religious believers, while Fodor’s challenge was exposed rather quickly by philosophers as trading on confusions (even Nagel disowns it in a footnote). Nagel now enters the fray with a far-reaching broadside against Darwin and materialism worthy of the true-believing Plantinga (whom Nagel cites favorably). We suspect that philosophers—even philosophers sympathetic to some of Nagel’s concerns—will be disappointed by the actual quality of the argument.
Nagel opposes two main components of the “materialist” view inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The first is what we will call theoretical reductionism, the view that there is an order of priority among the sciences, with all theories ultimately derivable from physics and all phenomena ultimately explicable in physical terms. We believe, along with most philosophers, that Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phenomena in terms unrecognizable by physics. As the philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher pointed out some thirty years ago, even classical genetics has not been fully reduced to molecular genetics, and that reduction would have been wholly within one field. We simply do not see any serious attempts to reduce all the “higher” sciences to the laws of physics.
Yet Nagel argues in his book as if this kind of reductive materialism really were driving the scientific community. The only named target is the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, famous for his defense of the primacy of physics in such popular works as Dreams of a Final Theory (1992). Here is what Nagel writes in describing Weinberg’s view:

My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology, chemistry, and physics—a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung 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. Such a world view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those sciences, and its acceptance or nonacceptance would have no effect on most scientific research.

Nagel here aligns himself, as best we can tell, with the majority view among both philosophers and practicing scientists. Just to take one obvious example, very little of the actual work in biology inspired by Darwin depends on reductive materialism of this sort; evolutionary explanations do not typically appeal to Newton’s laws or general relativity. Given this general consensus (the rhetoric of some popular science writing by Weinberg and others aside), it is puzzling that Nagel thinks he needs to bother attacking theoretical reductionism.
The second component of the thesis Nagel opposes is what we will call naturalism, the view that features of our world—including “consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value”—can ultimately be accounted for in terms of the natural processes described by the various sciences (whether or not they are ever “reduced” to physics). Nagel’s arguments here are aimed at a more substantial target, although he gives us few specifics about the kind of naturalism he opposes. He does characterize it as the attempt to explain everything “at the most basic level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology,” and the one named proponent of this view is the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Although Dennett would not characterize his project as trying to explain everything at the “most basic level,” he does aim to show that phenomena such as consciousness, purpose and thought find a natural home in a picture of human beings inspired by Darwin. In the absence of any clearer statement of the argument, we will assume that this is the so-called “neo-Darwinian” picture that Nagel opposes.
Naturalists, including Dennett, defend their view by appealing to the extraordinary fruitfulness of past scientific work, including work growing out of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. So what should we make of the actual work in biology that supports the “materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature” that Nagel thinks “is almost certainly false”? Defending such a sweeping claim might seem to require a detailed engagement with the relevant science, yet in a striking admission early on, Nagel reveals that his book “is just the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist.” And a recurring objection to what he learned from his layman’s reading of popular science writing is that much science “flies in the face of common sense,” that it is inconsistent with “evident facts about ourselves, that it “require[s] us to deny the obvious,” and so on.
 This style of argument does not, alas, have a promising history. After all, what could be more common-sensical, obvious or evident than the notion that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the earth? All ordinary evidence supports that verdict: we know from experience that people fall off things that are spherical, especially when trying to hang upside down from them, and we know that the sun rises in the sky in one direction and sets in the other as it revolves around the seemingly flat earth. Happily, Nagel does not attempt to repudiate the Copernican revolution in astronomy, despite its hostility to common sense. But he displays none of the same humility when it comes to his preferred claims of common sense—the kind of humility that nearly 400 years of nonevident yet true scientific discoveries should engender. Are we really supposed to abandon a massively successful scientific research program because Nagel finds some scientific claims hard to square with what he thinks is obvious and “undeniable,” such as his confidence that his “clearest moral…reasonings are objectively valid”?
In support of his skepticism, Nagel writes: “The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.” This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos. Epistemic humility—the recognition that we could be wrong—is a virtue in science as it is in daily life, but surely we have some reason for thinking, some four centuries after the start of the scientific revolution, that Aristotle was on the wrong track and that we are not, or at least not yet. Our reasons for thinking this are obvious and uncontroversial: mechanistic explanations and an abandonment of supernatural causality proved enormously fruitful in expanding our ability to predict and control the world around us. The fruits of the scientific revolution, though at odds with common sense, allow us to send probes to Mars and to understand why washing our hands prevents the spread of disease. We may, of course, be wrong in having abandoned teleology and the supernatural as our primary tools for understanding and explaining the natural world, but the fact that “common sense” conflicts with a layman’s reading of popular science writing is not a good reason for thinking so.
Incompatibility with common sense is not Nagel’s only argument against naturalism. A second line of argument begins by appealing to what he takes to be an everyday opinion: that there are objective moral, logical and mathematical truths. He then argues that the existence of these kinds of objective truths is incompatible with naturalism. For the moral case, Nagel asks: If our moral faculties are simply the result of evolution, how can they be reliable measures of objective moral truth? Why should evolution prefer the perception of moral truth to whatever happens to be advantageous for reproduction? Thus, if some of our moral beliefs really are objectively true, then they cannot be the result of evolution. And because he is confident that we do know some objective moral truths, Nagel concludes that “a Darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in its favor.” Recognizing that readers will find this inference jarring, Nagel adds: “I, even more strangely, am relying on a philosophical claim to refute a scientific theory supported by empirical evidence.”
There is, indeed, much that is strange here. To begin, there is nothing remotely common-sensical about Nagel’s confidence in the objectivity of moral truth. While Nagel and his compatriots apparently take very seriously their moral opinions—so seriously that they find it incredible to suggest that their “confidence in the objective truth of [their] moral beliefs” might, in fact, be “completely illusory”—this can hardly claim the mantle of “the common sense view.” Ordinary opinion sometimes tends toward objectivism, to be sure—often by relying on religious assumptions that Nagel explicitly rejects—but it also often veers toward social or cultural relativism about morality. Whether morality is truly objective is a philosopher’s claim (and a controversial one even among philosophers) about which “common sense” is either agnostic or mixed.
We take no stance on Nagel’s hypothesis that if our moral faculties are simply the result of evolution, they cannot be reliable measures of objective moral truth. But we should note that Nagel’s colleague, philosopher Sharon Street, accepts it and draws the opposite conclusion. She argues that because this hypothesis is true, and because we are obviously the products of evolution, we should give up the idea that there are objective moral truths in Nagel’s sense. Given the philosophical plausibility of Street’s alternative response—not to mention the simplistic evolutionary reasoning the whole debate is predicated on—it is hard to see why any biologist should be given pause by Nagel’s argument.
A more interesting challenge—really, the only interesting philosophical point raised in the book—concerns logical and mathematical truths. Is it possible, Nagel asks, to reconcile a naturalistic and biological picture of the evolution of our cognitive capacities with the confidence we have in our ability to do logic and mathematics? Nagel’s argument invokes a contrast with our perceptual capabilities, because our ability to reliably perceive many of the features of our physical environment seems likely to have an evolutionary explanation. (After all, if we could not reliably spot sudden cliffs or saber-toothed tigers, our reproductive fitness would be seriously compromised!) But logical truths are not like that, Nagel argues. It is self-evident that something cannot be both red and not-red at the same time (the “law of non-contradiction”). So, too, it is self-evident that if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socates is necessarily mortal. Even if evolution endowed us with the capacity to recognize the law of non-contradiction and to draw valid deductive inferences, how does it explain the obvious truth of these logical claims? Nagel’s response to this question is that evolution cannot—and the problem is even worse than that:

Any evolutionary account of the place of reason presupposes reason’s validity and cannot confirm it without circularity.
Eventually the attempt to understand oneself in evolutionary, naturalistic terms must bottom out in something that is grasped as valid in itself—something without which the evolutionary understanding would not be possible.

In other words, even if one thinks there is an evolutionary explanation for why we recognize the obviousness of logical, mathematical and scientific truths, there would still be the question of why we think evolutionary theory itself is justified. An evolutionary explanation of that latter fact would have to presuppose the correctness of the theory whose justification we are questioning, making the argument circular: we would have to assume that evolutionary theory is true in order to investigate whether it is true!
 There is a response to this kind of challenge, one that is widely embraced by philosophical naturalists (though, again, not mentioned by Nagel). This response starts by noting that we determine what is “rational” or “justified” simply by appealing to the most successful forms of inquiry into the world that human beings have developed. Paradigmatic examples of those successful forms of inquiry are, of course, physics, chemistry and biology. They are successful precisely in the way that Aristotelian science was not: they enable us to navigate the world around us, to predict its happenings and control some of them. To confuse one’s intuitive confidence in the logical and epistemic norms that make these sciences possible with some kind of a priori access to the “rational order of the world,” as Nagel puts it, is to forget whence that confidence derives—namely, the very success of these sciences. For philosophical naturalists, the charge of circularity is empty, akin to suggesting that the need for a usable table to have legs requires some justification beyond the fact that the legs actually do a necessary job.
Philosophical naturalists often appeal to the metaphor of “Neurath’s Boat,” named after the philosopher who developed it. Our situation as inquirers trying to understand the world around us, according to Neurath, is like that of sailors who must rebuild their ship while at sea. These sailors do not have the option of abandoning the ship and rebuilding a new one from scratch. They must, instead, try to rebuild it piecemeal, all the time staying afloat on other parts of the ship on which they continue to depend. In epistemological terms, we are also “at sea”: we cannot abandon all the knowledge about the world we have acquired from the sciences and then ask what we really know or what is really rational. The sciences that have worked so well for us are precisely our benchmark for what we know and what is rational; they’re the things that are keeping us “afloat.” Extending this metaphor, we can say that Nagel is the sailor who says, “I know the ideal form a ship should take—it is intuitively obvious, I am confident in it—so let us jump into the ocean and start building it from scratch.”
We agree with Nagel that if the sciences could not explain our capacity to have thoughts about the world around us, that would be a serious failing and a reason to call their findings into question. But they can and they do! It is here that Nagel’s lack of engagement with contemporary cognitive science and his idiosyncratic views about what a scientific explanation should look like make his argument especially perplexing. He writes, in what might seem a massive concession to his naturalistic opponents, “The appearance of animal consciousness is evidently the result of biological evolution, but this well-supported empirical fact is not yet an explanation—it does not provide understanding, or enable us to see why the result was to be expected or how it came about.” On Nagel’s view, consciousness arose from evolution, but despite knowing this fact, we have not explained the origin of consciousness. In a similar vein, Nagel writes:

It is not an explanation to say just that the physical process of evolution has resulted in creatures with eyes, ears, central nervous systems, and so forth, and that it is simply a brute fact of nature that such creatures are conscious in the familiar ways. Merely to identify a cause is not to provide a significant explanation, without some understanding of why the cause produces the effect.

Nagel endorses the idea that explanation and prediction are symmetrical: “An explanation must show why it was likely that an event of that type occurred.” In other words, to explain something is to be in a position to have predicted it if we could go back in time. He also writes, “To explain consciousness, a physical evolutionary history would have to show why it was likely that organisms of the kind that have consciousness would arise.” Indeed, he goes further, claiming that “the propensity for the development of organisms with a subjective point of view must have been there from the beginning.”
This idea, however, is inconsistent with the most plausible views about prediction and explanation, in both philosophy and science. Philosophers of science have long argued that explanation and prediction cannot be fully symmetrical, given the importance of probabilities in explaining natural phenomena. Moreover, we are often in a position to understand the causes of an event, but without knowing enough detail to have predicted it. For example, approximately 1 percent of children born to women over 40 have Down syndrome. This fact is a perfectly adequate explanation of why a particular child has Down syndrome, but it does not mean we could have predicted that this particular child would develop it. Causes alone are frequently deemed sufficient to explain events; knowing enough to predict those events in advance is an important scientific achievement, but not essential to explanation.
* * *
Nagel doesn’t think so, and because of that, he advocates the reintroduction of teleological reasoning into science. (Teleology—the idea that natural phenomena have built-in purposes or ends—was central to Aristotelian science, and it remained very influential until the scientific revolution.) In his discussion of the origin of life, Nagel says that natural teleology would mean that, “in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are ‘biased toward the marvelous.’”
This is an astonishing though certainly evocative phrase (Nagel adapts it from another writer), yet Nagel offers no further explication of it. He does admit that this proposal “flies in the teeth of the authoritative form of explanation that has defined science since the revolution of the seventeenth century.” Unfortunately, he is also extremely unclear about what he means by “natural teleology,” other than assuring the reader that it is neither part of standard physical laws nor the introduction of theology. One might think that “principles of self-organization or of the development of complexity over time,” which Nagel gives as examples of natural teleology, are the sort of things studied by mainstream protein chemists, developmental biologists and condensed-matter physicists. But apparently these sciences, which study how complex order can be built up from simple physical processes, are not on the right track. Nagel never explains why.
We conclude with a comment about truth in advertising. Nagel’s arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop “rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that “the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Mind and Cosmos is certainly an apt title for Nagel’s philosophical meditations, but his subtitle—”Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”—is highly misleading. Nagel, by his own admission, relies only on popular science writing and brings to bear idiosyncratic and often outdated views about a whole host of issues, from the objectivity of moral truth to the nature of explanation. No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “is almost certainly false.” The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues. Even a philosopher sympathetic to Nagel’s worries about the naturalistic worldview would not claim this volume comes close to living up to that subtitle. Its only effect will be to make the book an instrument of mischief. - Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg
 

To review Thomas Nagel's new book for the Mises Daily seems at first sight a misplaced endeavor. The book has nothing to say about libertarianism or Austrian economics; moreover, Nagel's own political views are decidedly non-libertarian. He wrote the most influential critical review of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and he rejects Lockean theories of property ownership, instead viewing property rights as conventional.[1] Nevertheless, one chapter in the book raises issues of profound concern to anyone interested in political philosophy, and it is for this reason that I wish to comment on it here.
Suppose one says that it is wrong to initiate force against other people. What does it mean to say that this claim is true? Are moral judgments just personal preferences, or are they more than this? Mises favored the former alternative. We can judge objectively that certain actions are suitable means to achieve a goal, but ultimate value judgments cannot be assessed as rational or irrational.

To apply the concept rational or irrational to the ultimate end chosen is nonsensical. We may call irrational the ultimate given, viz., those things that our thinking can neither analyze nor reduce to other ultimately given things. Then every ultimate end chosen by any man is irrational. It is neither more nor less rational to aim at riches like Croesus than to aim at poverty like a Buddhist monk. (Human Action, p. 880)

To many, though, this seems inadequate. It's isn't only that we prefer not to murder innocent children, for example: it really is wrong to do so, in a sense not reducible to people's choices or anything else. (Mises would I think say that the rule against murder, combined with other moral rules, is a means by which we can achieve a society of peace and prosperity, which nearly everyone wants; but that this latter preference is an ultimate judgment of value that is neither true nor false.)
As Nagel says,

Instead of explaining the truth or falsity of value judgments in terms of their conformity to our considered motivational dispositions or moral sense, as the subjectivist does, the [moral] realist explains our moral sense as a faculty that aims to identify those facts in our circumstances that count for and against certain courses of action, and to discover how they combine to determine what course would be the right one, or what set of alternatives would be permissible or advisable and what others ruled out. (p. 102)

In brief, morality is a matter of finding out, not choosing or feeling.
Nagel thinks it is coherent to reject moral realism, but nevertheless he finds the view more compelling than its subjectivist competitors:

To be sure, there are competing subjectivist explanations of the appearance of mind-independence in the truth of moral and other value judgments.… There is no crucial experiment that will establish or refute realism about value … the realist interpretation of what we are doing in thinking about these things can carry conviction only if it is a better account than the subjectivist or social-constructivist alternative, and that is always going to be a comparative question and a matter of judgment, as it is about any other domain, whether it be mathematics or science or history or aesthetics. (pp. 104–5)

But is not moral realism exposed to a decisive objection, famously pressed by John L. Mackie? In suggesting that values are "out there" in the world, rather than human preferences or sentiments, does not the moral realist postulate "ontologically queer" abstract objects, unlike anything else in the universe?
Nagel convincingly shows that this objection rests on a misunderstanding. Moral realism does not hold that there is, in addition to ordinary objects, a special class of metaphysical objects called "values." Rather, its contention is that moral reasons do not require reduction to something else in order to count as legitimate.

The dispute between realism and subjectivism is not about the contents of the universe. It is a dispute about the order of normative explanation. Realists believe that moral and other evaluative judgments can often be explained by more general or basic evaluative truths, together with the facts that bring them into play.… But they do not believe that the evaluative element in such a judgment can be explained by anything else. That there is a reason to do what will avoid grievous harm to a sentient creature is, in a realist view, one of the kinds of things that can be true in itself, and not because something else is true. (p. 102)

If Nagel spurns metaphysical objects, does this suffice to vindicate moral realism? A common objection holds that even if objective reasons of the sort Nagel favors are not metaphysical in a dubious sense, they remain inconsistent with the naturalistic outlook on the world required by evolutionary biology. Allan Gibbard has presented an influential account of this contention:

How could we be in any position to intuit moral truths, or normative truths in general? No answer is apparent in the biological picture I sketched. Non-natural facts are absent from the picture, and so are any powers to get at non-natural truths by intuition. Interpreting the natural goings-on as thoughts and judgments doesn't change this. If moral knowledge must depend on intuition, we seem driven to moral skepticism.[2]

The objection, in brief, is this: Evolution can account for our attraction to pleasure or aversion to pain. But it knows nothing of objective reasons: how could a faculty for grasping them have evolved? Unless, then, we abandon science, we must give up moral realism. Nagel considers a paper by Sharon Street, arguing to this effect, and he is much impressed by it. But he takes the argument in a different direction from that taken by Street and her fellow naturalists. If moral objectivity is inconsistent with our current picture of evolution, that is a reason to think that this picture gives us an incomplete and inadequate understanding of the world:

I agree with Sharon Street's position that moral realism is incompatible with a Darwinian account of the evolutionary influence on our faculties of moral and evaluative judgment. Street holds that a Darwinian account is strongly supported by contemporary science, so she concludes that moral realism is false. I follow the same inference in the opposite direction: since moral realism is true, a Darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in its favor. (p. 105)

If Nagel is right, it makes sense to speak of objective moral reasons; but what must the universe be like for this to be true? The question must not be misunderstood. It is not, what in the universe makes moral reasons objectively true? To ask this would be precisely to reject Nagel's chief contention, that nothing makes moral reasons true: they require no justification from something else. Rather, the question to be addressed is, what must the universe be like if there are free-standing moral reasons of the kind Nagel accepts?
One alternative to the Darwinian view Nagel finds untrue to the moral facts is theism, but to this he is temperamentally averse. He prefers what he calls a teleological view.

According to the hypothesis of natural teleology, the natural world would have a propensity to give rise to beings of the kind that have a good — beings for which things can be good or bad. (p. 121)

Nagel's teleological view is by no means confined to value, and other chapters of the book apply the teleological approach to subjective consciousness and cognition as well.

But even though natural selection partly determines the details of the forms of life and consciousness that exist, and the relations among them, the existence of the genetic material and the possible forms it makes available for selection have to be explained in some other way. The teleological hypothesis is that these things may be determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them. (p. 123)

Nagel's argument is frankly speculative, but in the best sense; it opens to our consideration new possibilities, developed in an imaginative and deep way. Nagel is a great philosopher, and he could with justice say to his naturalist adversaries,

There are more things in heaven and earth …
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Notes

[1] For Nagel's views on political philosophy, see, e.g., "The Problem of Global Justice" in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (Oxford 2010) and my review of this in the Mises Review.
[2] Allan Gibbard, Reconciling Our Aims (Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 21. .  David Gordon

 

 How our hunger for definitive answers robs us of the intellectual humility necessary for understanding the universe and our place in it.

“The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder,” Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky famously noted, “but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.” And yet, we live in a media culture that warps seeds of scientific understanding into sensationalist, definitive headlines about the gene for obesity or language or homosexuality and maps where, precisely, love or fear or the appreciation of Jane Austen is located in the brain — even though we know that it isn’t the clinging to answers but the embracing of ignorance that drives science.
In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel penned the essay “What It’s Like To Be A Bat?”, which went on to become one of the seminal texts of contemporary philosophy of mind. Nearly four decades later, he returns with Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (public library) — a provocative critique of the limits of scientific reductionism, exploring what consciousness might be if it isn’t easily explained as a direct property of physical interactions and if the door to the unknown were, as Richard Feynman passionately advocated, left ajar.
To be sure, Nagel is far from siding with the intellectual cop-outs of intelligent design. His criticism of reductive materialism isn’t based on religious belief (or on any belief in a particular alternative, for that matter) but, rather, on the insistence that a recognition of these very limitations is a necessary precondition for exploring such alternatives, “or at least being open to their possibility” — a possibility that makes mind central to understanding the natural order, rather than an afterthought or a mere byproduct of physical laws.
He writes in the introduction:

[T]he mind-body problem is not just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.
[…]
Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.

As a proponent of making the timeless timely again through an intelligent integration of history with contemporary culture, I find Nagel’s case for weaving a historical perspective into the understanding of mind particularly compelling:

The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.
[…]
The greatest advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of the world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws, But at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. But more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science. Mind, as a development of life, must be included as the most recent stage of this long cosmological history, and its appearance, I believe, casts its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and principles on which the process depends.

Ultimately, Nagel echoes John Updike’s reflection on the possibility of “permanent mystery”:

It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development.

Though Mind and Cosmos isn’t a neat package of scientific, or even philosophical, answers, it’s a necessary thorn in the side of today’s all-too-prevalent scientific reductionism and a poignant affirmation of Isaac Asimov’s famous contention that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” - Maria Popova

 

Thomas Nagel's new Oxford University Press book Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False includes so many compelling statements about the scientific weaknesses in neo-Darwinian evolution and chemical evolution that it would surely violate copyright to reproduce them all for you.
But we can share a couple. John West already cited one striking passage where the well-known atheist, philosopher, and legal scholar credits proponents of intelligent design for providing potent criticisms of neo-Darwinian evolution. Nagel concludes that ID proponents "do not deserve the scorn with which they are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair." (p. 10)
To see exactly where Nagel stands, it's worth looking a little deeper into his criticisms of neo-Darwinian and chemical evolution:

It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by example. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true. (Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, p. 6 (Oxford University Press, 2012).)

Nagel then poses two questions. He first asks whether the origin of life is likely to have occurred by purely physical and chemical processes alone. The second question pertains to biological evolution, and he frames it in a way that is very similar to how proponents of intelligent design address the same problem. Nagel asks: "In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?" (p. 6) Nagel begins to answers those two questions as follows:

There is much more uncertainty in the scientific community about the first question than about the second. Many people think it will be difficult to come up with a reductionist explanation of the origin of life, but most people have no doubt that accidental genetic variation is enough to support the actual history of evolution by natural selection, once reproducing organisms have come into existence.

Nagel, however, observes that the despite the widespread confidence in Darwinian accounts of the evolution of life, the case has not been made:

It is no longer legitimate simply to imagine a sequence of gradually evolving phenotypes, as if their appearance through mutations in the DNA were unproblematic -- as Richard Dawkins does for the evolution of the eye. (p. 9)

Also, with regard to the origin of life, he observes that "the coming into existence of the genetic code -- an arbitrary mapping of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms that can read the code and carry out its instructions -- seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable given physical law alone." (p. 10) What is refreshing about Nagel's perspective is that he's willing to ask hard questions -- even if those questions go against the "consensus," and even if, as he believes, no satisfactory answers are currently on offer. He writes:

My skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. (p. 7)

He continues, observing that too many people simply defer to the consensus and aren't willing to take problems with it seriously:

[D]oubts about the reductionist account of life go against the dominant scientific consensus, but that consensus faces problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such evolution. (p. 9)

Nagel is a bold scholar who is brave enough to think for himself, and isn't going to be bullied into capitulating to the consensus. He has a lot more to say in his book -- and it's worth reading. Pick up a copy and see for yourself. - Casey Luskin

			Prefatory Note: Our usual policy at The Threepenny Review is to assign one book to one author. But in this case two of our longtime writers—P. N. Furbank, an essayist, critic, and biographer who lives in London, and Louis B. Jones, a novelist and essayist who lives in the Sierra foothills—both wanted to review the same book. So we let them. We think the results are instructive: not oppositional, not mutually contradictory, but very different approaches to the same subject. We are also pleased that neither Jones nor Furbank is a professional philosopher. (After all, philosophical theories, if they bear on reality, should be meaningful to the rest of us.) So here they are—first Jones, then Furbank—commenting on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, out in the fall of 2012 in both America and England from Oxford University Press. My stranded trailer in the woods looks onto a clearing where wild sweet pea vies with starthistle, fescue with blue-eye grass and miner’s lettuce, all competing as they’ve done, possibly, since the Sierra first crumbled into soil and started inviting plants to colonize. It is a patch of ground, then, that existed through the geologic ages in the peculiar twilight oblivion of being unwitnessed—until the first Maidu people came along, probably climbing up from the creek below. Before the Maidu, the witnesses of the place were the animals. And now these days I’m here, to substantiate this little clearing’s existence. It’s almost a weary old joke in philosophy, but still a surefire, hard-to-retire joke—that I’m necessary to this clearing’s existence. My mind. The joke, however, is making a serious, small comeback in this century. What’s more, the entire antique notion of teleology seems to be making a comeback, and not in the disreputable fringes—rather, right in the middle, in physics and biology and cosmology and academic philosophy. Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos, is a straightforward effort to invite back teleology. The idea of a “teleological cause”—a notion of Aristotle’s, and much beloved in the Middle Ages—runs like this: There are two kinds of answer to the question, Why did it rain yesterday? It’s one kind of answer to say, “It rained because water vapor condensed in the atmosphere.” That, in Aristotle’s language, names the efficient cause. But to answer, “It rained because the grass needs water to survive” is to offer a wholly other kind of reason. The latter is the teleological cause, or final cause. In teleological thinking, the final result is an event’s cause. The goal is the cause. Efficient causes are likely to refer backwards in time: the rain precipitated because moist air rose to colder altitudes, which happened because the Pacific sent a wind up the Sierra, which happened after ocean water had evaporated, etc. In the other direction, teleological causes like to explore the future: the rain fell in order to make the grass grow, to provide grazing for summer cattle, so that the cattle may fatten and be butchered, to provide meat for the poet who lives in the glade, so that one day she may write her great meditative poem, so that, finally, Allah may be glorified. Why do humans have binocular vision and centrally placed noses? So that (among many other excellent reasons) the letters spelling HOMO DEI may appear graphically in the arrangement of human facial features, and we may be reminded of our Maker. For two thousand years after Aristotle, teleology was the preferred explanation for events. Hard to imagine these days. These days, since the Enlightenment, teleology has been pretty much extirpated as unscientific. If there were any traces of teleological thinking that remained, in some hermit’s cave, or in some quaint parish churchyard, the trumpet blast of Darwin chased it out. How the Elephant Got His Nose used to be a wondrous tale, involving the Argument from Design. These days the proboscidea, like everybody else, have a clear explanation. Philosophy has always been prompted most sharply by physics. This has been the case since philosophy’s birth among the Milesian Greeks, when defining “what Being is” brought up the first ideas about the basic constituents of matter. In recent years, physicists have been suggesting that, in a certain queer sense, mind is the cause of matter. Such a mysticism is still only a fume coming off quantum mechanics’ Copenhagen interpretation and many-worlds interpretation, and off the so-called anthropic theories of Big Bang cosmology. It’s a variety of thinking that is troubling, especially to many physicists. Maybe fans of the paranormal and the occult like to talk in such ways, saying mind causes matter, but for a serious empiricist it sounds like psychic hocus-pocus; it sounds like the road to solipsism, or nirvana; it sounds a little like Holy Writ. Thomas Nagel, Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU, now in his seventies, has made it part of his life’s work to keep us honest about a few small crucial distinctions, in particular to fight off reductionism: to fight off the oversimplifying tendency in scientific empiricism that would reduce our concept of mind to neurochemical phenomena alone. In mainstream science of mind, presently, reductionism rules. Everybody aims to discover “neural correlates of consciousness.” Everyone is watching MRI images in which brain-parts light up while subjects’ thoughts play. The ruling belief is that, when we have a “thought,” no part of it is an immaterial thing like a puffy dialogue-balloon over our heads; the thought has a physical, neural basis. The orthodox view is that the thought has a strictly physical basis. This is called the identity theory, that a “thought” and its nervous-system flicker are the same event. The identity theory, in the words of neuroscientist John Kihlstrom at Berkeley, explains the mind as nothing fancier than “sparks and drips at the synapses.” Thomas Nagel has been insisting that we must remain patiently agnostic in the face of this reductionist identification of mental with physical. In a famous essay from 1974, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” he defended the sovereignty of subjective consciousness. Each of us conscious beings, when we experience a simple thing like yellowness or a handclasp or anger, enjoys a personal, non-fungible subjectivity, whose mystery will never be accessible to the measurers of sparks and drips. Nagel’s very nice analogy, in the book Mind and Cosmos, is to a pocket calculator. If I tap the keys marked 5, +, 3, and =, the little gray window displays an 8. This small miracle is explainable in purely physical terms, as the tender pulse of electrons traveling through microchip gates. Such is the reductionist view of the brain. What Nagel wishes to point to is the much larger miracle, that the figure-eight pattern of pixels in the screen has a meaning! That astonishment—meaning—is not accessible to reductionist analysis. Only a sovereign consciousness sees that. Furthermore—and this is an additional leap of cognition that Nagel finds almost numinous—the little equation pertains to a logical, cognizable universe. How is it that this universe happens to fit, like a glove, our cogitations and surmises? There are still undiscovered theorems out there, theorems beyond the Pythagorean, or beyond the calculus, which we haven’t yet dreamed of, waiting to be rendered intelligible by the grey jelly in our skulls. So mind and cosmos are a pair of strangely mutual astonishments. And in addressing them, Nagel believes that the teleological step is necessary: “The intelligibility of the universe is no accident,” he says. His book suggests that physical matter itself—the proton, the quark, the first stardust—has always been imbued with a purpose, which it seeks to fulfill. This though he’s an atheist. All this makes me think of vitalism, a philosophy I remember from grade-school as a disgraced fallacy of past centuries. (French tadpoles were born spontaneously out of cold mud, or something like that—out of an elan vital.) Nagel doesn’t intend to be an obfuscator or a mystic. He is a dyed-in-the-wool atheist and takes pains to make that clear. He is very much on the side of science. But he feels that science has oversimplified two important mechanisms of nature: mind and evolution. The mind must be more than sparks and drips; and consciousness must have evolved by more than random accident. Mind and Cosmos lays out a far-reaching, general campaign. He wants to defend not only consciousness against reductionism, as in previous work, but also to defend the higher mental structures of cognition and ethics. Those two mental faculties, too, somehow inhered originally in matter. He is dubious of the Darwinian account of evolution on two accounts: he doesn’t think three billion years has provided enough sheer time for mere random mutation to have lifted us to the height of complexity that characterizes life today; and, more importantly, he sees unbridgeable gaps in the Darwinian story, especially at the point where the machine of self-replicating carbon-based matter is supposed to have flared up into full-blown consciousness. The Darwinians’ theory, at that point, lacks any sort of “pineal gland” of the kind Descartes resorted to, to be an interface between spiritual stuff and material stuff. Nagel thinks one must go beyond the Darwinian story to explain the appearance of “conscious organisms, and not merely behaviorally complex organisms.” This is not the most persuasive part of the book. He puts little faith in the notion that consciousness and cognition might have offered some survival advantage; or for that matter, that ethics, as they evolved, might have had survival value. He rather undervalues the notion that an animal with insight stands a better chance of surviving to reproduce, or that a species which has evolved a social or moral contract among its confreres, similarly, might get luckier. I wish he could come out and spend a day or two at my house to watch the small society that, this spring, is developing among a few new hens that peck in the hedgerows alongside two basking housecats and a dog. The cats are less than a year old and had never met a chicken, and they are psychopathic, calm, cold-hearted hunters. The dog is a herder and an alarmist. A number of protocols have evolved among the three species—the cats’ repression of their (obviously intoxicating) urge to hunt and harry, the cats’ and the other chickens’ obedience to the protective displays of the dominant Barred Plymouth Rock hen, as well as, too, the cats’ affectionate coexistence with the hens, whom they seem to admire somewhat—as all species together dally in the shade, edenically, but keeping an eye on one another. The silly chickens even follow the cats around sometimes, obeying an instinct to be herded. And the dog: his constabulary supervision of the whole scene; his interventions, when a cat forgets his manners and starts stalking a hen; his occasional spurt of playful pursuit. Meanwhile, all afternoon, overhead in the tree branches, perch species of birds who are less domesticated, less socialized according to Homo sapiens’ semiotic and cultural standards. The young male robins and finches and grosbeaks are singing for various well-known practical, seasonal reasons right now, and each is developing his own repertoire of calls and songs, while at the same time learning to imitate and reproduce, roughly, a few of the songs of his neighbor. This is an observation of field ethologists, who up and down the Sierra sit for days in their blinds with their clipboards: at the borders of their territories, wild male songbirds share songs. Ornithologists suppose it could be a form of sociability, conveying sociability’s mixed message of threat and appeal. The upshot is—and here’s the point—those males who learn more of their neighbors’ songs live longer and have more offspring. That distinction Nagel seems to make so easily—between the “conscious” organism and the “merely behaviorally complex” organism—has been on my mind for days; it’s fascinating; I have to confess I can’t quite iron it neatly flat. He underestimates the feel-good familiarity of culture, and how our consciousness takes shape in the semiotic basket woven around us by our mothers’ voices, among echoing voices of great-great-great-grandparents. He doesn’t allow for how consciousness is an essentially gregarious phenomenon, not an individual’s achievement but a congregant and linguistic phenomenon, whether it’s kindled in a single infant in the family or convivially in the whole race over five million years, within the vast ancient murmurous library of grammatical tongues. Unable to be a gradualist, he insists that consciousness had to appear in a sudden leap, because consciousness feels like such a whole different category of being. And morality, too, according to Nagel, pre-existed us as a kind of Platonic form, into which we are gradually growing, as we discover morality the way we discovered the Pythagorean theorem. No moral relativist, Nagel believes that certain deeds would be wrong whether humans thought so or not, and this structure of morality must have existed independently before conscious minds started musing over it. At the original point where life (self-replicating DNA) is supposed to have arisen from chemicals, he is unsatisfied with neo-Darwinists’ sleight of hand in explaining the Promethean leap, up to cognition and ethics. Something distinctly vitalist happened there, for Nagel. But he can’t specify what. He just knows he distrusts the incompleteness of science’s explanation. The book’s wider questions—its awe-inspiring questions—turn outward to address the uncanny cognizability of the universe around us. By what vast coincidence does an intelligible logos originate both in our minds and in the cosmos? “Mind,” says Nagel, “is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings.” His contention is that these happy correspondences are “fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments.” He calls it a natural teleology—or teleology without intention, as a way of stipulating that God has not designed any of this. “Mind and everything that goes with it is inherent in the universe,” he says. “The intelligibility of the world… is itself part of the explanation of why things are as they are.” That Mind is inherent in the original universe sounds like an outlier’s view, but he isn’t alone. Not only Thomas Nagel but a considerable small meme of contemporary philosophers and scientists are resorting to teleology, partly as a way of keeping a mythical God out of what seems a weirdly well-designed creation, or just an evidently unnecessary, unwished-for, gratuitous creation. Cosmologists lately (especially since the newest radio-telescopy’s confirmations of the Big Bang’s specific characteristics) have been going back to the idea that the reason this universe exists is that we are here observing it. This is the “anthropic” cosmology, a word proposed in the Fifties by astrophysicist Brandon Carter. The most common version of anthropic cosmology takes the following form: Among the potential billions of ill-mixed universes that may have been launched over infinite time, most happened to lack the ingredients for the evolution of life. Those universes were duds. This one wasn’t a dud because it has us here to observe it. Such a formula loads Mind into the front-end of the equation. Nagel, in an aside, dismisses all anthropic cosmology as “a cop-out.” Carter and John Wheeler and a number of other anthropic theorists have opened themselves to accusations of Berkeleyanism: their theories seem to suggest that that Bishop Berkeley’s esse est percipi (“to exist” is “to be perceived”) applies not only at the microscopic level of the quantum (where the observer is necessary to the subatomic event) but also in the expanses of the “quantum event” that was the Big Bang. Here on our planet in the lukewarm middle of the old Big Bang, we observers are indispensable dramatis personae, basking as we do in radiation that continues to reach us at light-speed from that original, ancient pop. The old sublime campfire question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” will always excite the shiver that is the beginning of all philosophizing, because the universe’s default condition should be nothingness. Nothingness is the easier ontological alternative. Infinite eternal nothingness would have the advantage of simplicity, obeying the Least-Work law of physics. It seems clear, however, that things do exist, and the new teleologists’ non-theistic suggestion is: the universe, by existing rather than not existing, has obeyed an a priori, ineluctable requirement of being sufficient, being somehow more fit than a non-existent universe would be, or more entirely inevitable particularly in being cognizable. (Sounds a little like St. Anselm’s old ontological proof of God’s existence, but reheated, as a warrant for anything’s existence.) This picture of a self-purposed universe blossoming in empty time-space makes me think of a Klein bottle, one of those fanciful geometric objects like a Möbius strip illustrating a topological paradox. A Klein bottle’s neck stretches out and swings around and gropes behind to reenter itself, pass through its own belly, and open its mouth onto its own outer wall: so its outside surface is continuous with its inside surface, paradoxically. As a picture, it seems to embody the philosophers’ teleological universe, whose final goal, Mind, is an end that always abided in its beginning. Like a Klein bottle, the floating, self-decreeing universe’s head is thrust up its posterior, an image to mimic the satiric caricature of all of us deep thinkers, us philosophes, who make so much of Mind. Mind, I have to admit, does seem to me numinous. Maybe it’s a weak-headedness of my own, but frankly, I’ve always been attracted to solipsism as an ontological doctrine, the utterly subjective, almost impolite position that I, alone in my forest clearing, am like Vishnu creator and preserver of the Universe. Solipsism has a terrific logical self-consistency, but it’s a very hard topic to discuss freely. (Just try broaching the topic with somebody. See what happens.) Nagel may be a patient, steadfast atheist and empiricist, but nevertheless, he wants to avert the “mindless universe” that will result if science is to succeed in its goal of reducing everything to pure physicality. Physical reductionism has had such a complete triumph in the sciences, he admits—and is he being coy or is he just thinking out loud, forlornly?—that his notion of teleology “in the present intellectual climate…is unlikely to be taken seriously.” The problem is, having poked a hole in the Darwinist, physicalist tradition, he doesn’t propose any specific idea to fill in where he’s damaged. I think he’s simply doing the old-fashioned Socratic work of gadfly, probing for gaps in what science thinks it knows. Gaps might open the way toward a fuller Weltbild and a new paradigm. “These teleological speculations,” he says, “are offered merely as possibilities, without positive conviction. What I am convinced of is the negative claim,” that is, the claim that our universe isn’t just a mindless machine that evolved via random chance. In Nagel’s diagram (or rather, gesture), there are three salient attributes of existence which are too wonderful to be explained away mechanistically—consciousness, cognition, and eternal moral law—and they must have been part of physical matter from the beginning. A renowned philosopher, relaxed in his authority and unashamed to display some decent puzzlement, he makes equivocal confessions like “I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn’t.” Well, good luck. To my own sensibilities, the whole project seems like a glance in the right direction. Nagel, in the company of a number of scientists and rationalist philosophers who can’t be comforted by religion, hopes to discover in these teleological gropings a door—a needle’s eye—that might lead to a universe where, absent the supernatural policing of a god, nevertheless sweet reason comes naturally, and so does justice. —Louis B. Jones * The “mind,” potent word! I stand by my opinion, argued in the pages of the Spring 2010 issue of Threepenny, that to a considerable degree the celebrated “mind-body problem” is a dispute about the English language. There is no exact equivalent for the term “mind” in French or German (the French esprit is usually better translated as “intelligence,” or alternatively as “spirit”), and we are told by the French brain-scientist J.-P. Changeux that French thinkers are nervous of the “mind-body” question, when phrased in this way. Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind (1949), insisted that the mind is not a place or receptacle, or a tool, or—really—a thing at all, but he did not quite succeed in laying the Cartesian “ghost in the machine.” By contrast, the cherished “mind-body” topic makes its appearance in the very first sentence of the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s new book; and his thesis is that “materialism” is simply not equipped to take the full measure of “mind.” To suggest that so hugely significant a phenomenon as life and the mind can be explained, as Darwinians claim, by mere accident—the exploitation of random genetic mutations by natural selection—strikes him as an absurdity. Of course, we have heard this cavil often before, but what Nagel goes on to say is calculated to make us sit up in wonderment. He declares that, though he is personally an atheist, we may have to accept that there is “meaning” and “purpose” in the universe. Teleology may, he suggests, exist without consciousness. All this, perhaps perversely, has set my thoughts running upon that ill-reputed and incorrigible fellow, the “materialist.” The truth is, we shall not arrive at an understanding of materialism by studying its theories of matter. It is not a scientific doctrine, but rather a polemical and philosophical—you might almost say humanistic—affair, essentially negative in character. It regards it as essential to deny (what religion would claim and was once a great obstacle to scientific progress) that the world is inhabited by invisible and immaterial entities: God, angels, spirits, and souls. Samuel Johnson’s five-word definition of a materialist in his Dictionary, “A denier of spiritual substances,” hits it off very accurately. There lay materialism’s first task. Later, in the nineteenth century, it attacked a different question, the problem of personal identity, one which involved the relationship of the “mind” to the brain. The article on “Materialism” in the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought defines it as “The theory that everything that really exists is material in nature, by which is meant at least that it occupies some volume of space at any time and, usually, that it continues in existence for some period of time and is either accessible to perception by sight and touch, or is analogous in its causal properties to what is accessible.” The long article in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy speaks in broadly similar terms. But it mentions that Frege and Popper differentiate between three kinds of things, or “realms.” The first consists of material things; the second of psychological things, like thoughts, feelings, pains, and desires, “including the substantive minds that have these, if there are any”; and the third contains abstract things, like numbers, properties, classes, truths (and perhaps falsehoods), and values. In modern times, it tells us, philosophers have tended to direct their fire primarily against believers in the second realm. This is nicely put, but there seems all the same to be something seriously wrong with it—indeed, with both those definitions. For they lead to a quite unnecessary confusion, not about the word “matter” but about the word “exists.” Presumably the objection to belief in Frege and Popper’s “second realm,” the psychological one, has been on the grounds that thoughts, feelings, pains, and desires are not material. Nor, of course, are they (though the living beings who have them are thoroughly material). Nevertheless thoughts, feelings, pains, and desires are the main substance and the most familiar feature of human life, and it would seem absurd, it would be positively weird, to deny that they are real. Many things are indisputably real, of which it does not make sense to say that they exist. David Hume goes so far as to state as an axiom that an object may exist and yet be nowhere, and says—rightly, I would think—that “the greatest part of beings do and must exist after this manner.” Language quietly acknowledges the situation and prescribes that, instead of saying that such intangible objects “exist,” we should speak of having thoughts and experiencing or suffering pains and desires. But at all events they are the distinctive features of the human. What would help, one cannot help feeling—and it might clear matters up wonderfully—is if one were to turn things round and reduce the Frege/Popper doctrine to a mere definition. It would then run, “When saying that something ‘exists,’ we shall mean that it has dimensions, occupies some volume of space, etc.” This would be a reminder of the vast and obvious difference between saying that something exists and saying that it is real. It is a mistake, though a common one, to call Lucretius, the author of the great atheistic poem De Rerum Natura, a materialist, for the term had not been invented in his day. We could call him a “corporealist,” but so was everyone in his time. Neither he nor most people in his day had any notion of the incorporeal. It would bewilder St. Augustine even some centuries later when his mentor St. Ambrose said that, when God or the soul were being thought of, “our thoughts should dwell on no corporeal reality whatsoever.” It would be many years before Augustine could make sense of this. Materialism came into the world with Descartes, or rather with the profound hostility to Descartes and his “dualism” on the part of the great Thomas Hobbes. (One will better understand the powerful attraction of Cartesian dualism if one phrases it, not as the “mind-body problem,” but as the “soul-body problem”—for Descartes represented his soul as being his ego, his personal identity, and supposed this identity might even survive the death of the body.) Human beings, out of fear, so Hobbes argued—and this would become a basic materialist doctrine—imagine the world to be peopled by “invisible agents,” supposing them to be “real, and external Substances, not realising that they are merely creatures of the Fancy, like dreams and looking-glass reflections.” In France there had for long been a freethinking tradition, and numerous clandestine writings had been in circulation in manuscript, some the work of hard-up garret-dwellers, others coming from the pen of highly respectable members of the royal academies. It was the consensus among them that only the material exists, the “soul” being a superfluous hypothesis. Matter had existed from all eternity and was, or might be, self-moving, and it had a capacity for feeling and thought. In 1747 there was actually published, though in Holland, a work by the French physician Julien de la Mettrie entitled L’Homme machine (Man a machine), mockingly putting down man’s pretension to superiority over animals. La Mettrie was or had been an admirer of Descartes, whose greatness it had been, he said, to realize that animals were automata—his only error being not to have seen that the same was true of humans. The book, to La Mettrie’s joy, created a considerable scandal, making it necessary for him to take refuge in Germany. Whether one goes along with the materialists or not, it has to be admitted that they and their slogans make a colorful impression. Jean de Cabanis (1757–1808) theorized that the brain was an organ specifically designed to produce thought in the same way as the stomach and intestines produced digestion. Jakob Moleschott, a Dutch-Italian botanist and physiologist, coined a number of much-quoted dicta: “The brain secretes thoughts as the liver does bile”; “No thought without phosphorous”; and so on. Louis Büchner’s Force and Matter (1855) won him great fame (only eclipsed by the appearance of Darwin’s The Origin of Species four years later), though his book lost him his university post and prompted its reviewer in the Frankfurter Katholische Kirchenblatt to say that the proper place for authors of books of this kind was prison. Materialists, on occasion, were of great service to the progress of science. They were so in the “vitalist” controversy of the early nineteenth century, throwing their weight with great enthusiasm against the vitalists, who held that life was governed by different biochemical laws from organic matter, being sustained by a “vital force” of unknown, perhaps supernatural origin. Vitalism was finally demolished by the great Claude Bernard (1813–78), and it was he (though he did not publicly describe himself as a materialist) who saw the importance of settling the status of the brain, as “unquestionably the organ of intelligence, as the heart is of the circulation and the larynx is of the voice.” Though on the other hand, he wrote, as everyone would agree, “nothing whatever is known at present about the nature of the relation of the brain to thought.” Materialism continues to center itself upon the brain, sometimes showing a (grammatically puzzling) tendency to say that thoughts and feelings are the brain. Francis Crick, of double helix fame, writes provokingly in his The Astonishing Hypothesis of the astonishing hypothesis that you, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. I have given this hasty little sketch of materialism to bring out the contrast with Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. Nagel maintains that we are called on to rethink the concept of “mind” in the widest possible terms, ones involving the whole universe. “The mind-body problem…invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history,” he says. If consciousness and perception and reason have a natural explanation, the possibilities must have been inherent in the universe long before there was life, “indeed have existed from the beginnings of time.” Well, no doubt possibilities are, or begin life by being, endless. But what we are looking for from Nagel is probabilities, and he cannot be said to have provided any. For, with all respect to him (and he can be an original and cogent writer), his argument in regard to the “universe” and the “cosmos” strikes one as fatally unspecific, indeed almost impalpable. His language about the universe is bizarre. He speaks (as we saw) of “our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history”; but, apart from the very latest millennium or two, the universe has no history. The dinosaurs, the drifting of the continents, and the Big Bang are not links in a historical chain; they are, and very properly, called prehistoric. And Nagel’s phrase “a long historical period in the distant past” sins in much the same manner. A place must be found, he says, for consciousness, perception, beliefs, etc. in “any complete conception of the universe”—but who has that? At one point he recklessly asserts that “we are composed of the same elements as the rest of the universe.” It is something one wouldn’t want to bet on. As for the “mind,” which Nagel holds could not have been brought into being merely by Darwinian natural selection, it has played a magnificent part in English poetry: in Marvell, Keats, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and so on. But it is not at home in philosophy. The “mind-body problem,” a sort of Indian rope-trick, is a toy which has been teasing and entertaining philosophers for too long. —P. N. Furbank