Mind and Cosmos

Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

Thomas Nagel - is the University Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law of New York University. He is a fellow of the British Academy. In 2008, he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy and the Balzan Prize in Moral Philosophy.

Introduction

Nagel states that the aim of his book is to argue that the mind-body problem is not just a local problem, but that it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.  (3)

Nagel believes that the task falls to philosophy to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge. He hopes that this will lead to a new form of scientific understanding.  (3)

The starting point for the argument is the failure of psychophysical reductionism could in principle provide a theory of everything. (4)

Nagel believes that the weight of evidence favors some form of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism and dualism. (5)

Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded not only as scientifically but politically in correct.  (5)

Nagel asks two questions:

                1. Given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?

                2. Questions the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began.  (6)

                -Nagel believes that there is much more uncertainty in the scientific community in the first            question than the second.

                -States that his skepticism is not based on religious beliefs nor in any definite alternative.

                                "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." (7)

 

His project seeks to combine two set of conditions which seem jointly impossible. First, an assumption that certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world; second, the ideal of discovering a single natural order that unifies everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principles.

                Cartesian dualism rejects the second, materialism and idealism fail to realize it. Theism is sometimes also incompatible with it.

Nagel notes that the great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world and that at some point it will become necessary to develop a more comprehensive understanding which includes the mind  (8)

                                "Those who have seriously criticized these arguments have certainly

                                shown that there are ways to resist the design conclusion; but the general

                                 force of the negative part of the intelligent design position- skepticism about

                                the likelihood of the orthodox reductive view, given the available evidence-

                                does not appear to me to have been destroyed in these exchanges. (11)

 

The prevailing scientific doctrine cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.

Antireductionism and the Natural Order

 

Scientific Naturalism - The hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical sciences

Antireductionism - Doubts whether the reality of such features of our world such as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at the most basic level of only physical facts. (13)

 

If the mental is not itself merely physical, it cannot be fully explained by science. If one doubts that the mental can be reduced to the physical then there is reason to doubt that reductive materialism can apply even in biology and also doubt that it can give an adequate account of the physical world. (14)

 

If evolutionary theory biology is a physical theory- then it cannot account for the appearance of consciousness and of other phenomena that are not physically reducible.

                -Nagel believes this opens up the possibility of a conception of the natural order which makes mind central instead of an effect of a physical law.

 

Materialism requires reductionism; therefore the failure of reductionism requires an alternative to materialism.

 

Nagel contends that mind is a basic aspect of nature and not an accident, afterthought or add-on. (16)

He claims himself to be an objective idealist due to the view that rational intelligibility is the root of the natural order. (17) "The intelligibility of this world is no accident."

 

The largest question within which all natural science is embedded also the largest question in philosophy- namely in what way or ways is the world intelligible? (18)

 

Nagel seeks an alternative to reductive naturalism which makes mind, meaning and value as fundamental as matter and space-time in account of what there is. "The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been inferred to explain the behavior of the inanimate world."

-Something MORE is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures whose bodies and brains are composed of those elements.  (20)

 

Theism rejects the reductive materialist conclusions by attributing the mental phenomena found within the world to the working of a comprehensive mental source, of which they are miniature versions.

                                -Nagel's interest is in the territory between theism and materialism.

Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside, using very different resources.

 

                                Two Extremes:  Descartes Proof and Naturalized Epistemology

1. Theistic validation of perception and scientific reasoning by the proof that God would not deceive us.

2. Perceptual and cognitive faculties evolved by natural selection can be generally reliable in leading us to true beliefs.

                1. Faces the famous Cartesian circle; 2. Faces an analogous naturalistic circle.

Nagel hopes to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not radically self-undermining.

 

"Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one." (25)

 

Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world. (26)

It does not however, explain how beings like us fit into the world - the intelligibility from within (the natural order) would still be missing.

                                               

Materialist theories try to make the natural order internally intelligible by explaining our place in it without reference to anything outside. This still requires reliance on some of our own faculties. (27)

                                               

                                                "Structurally, it is still the Cartesian ideal, but with the leading

                                                 role played by evolutionary theory instead of by an a priori                                                                                          demonstration of divine benevolence." (27)

 

Evolutionary naturalism would almost certainly require that we give up moral realism. "The failure of evolutionary naturalism to provide a form of transcendent self-understanding should not lead us to abandon the search for transcendent self-understanding." (28)

 

Nagel thinks it is reasonable to evaluate hypotheses about the universe and how we have come to exist by reference to ordinary judgments in which we have very high confidence. "The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions about other subjects is due to a secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding that provides an alternative to theism."(29)

 

Nagel hopes for a comprehensive understanding of the self that is neither theistic nor reductionist.

 

-Nagel believes these views lead to rejecting the project of external self-understanding altogether and instead limiting ourselves to the formidable task of understanding our point of view toward the world from within. (30)

An adequate form of self-understanding would be an alternative to materialism, it would have to include mentalistic and rational elements of some kind. "These could belong to the natural world and need not imply a transcendent individual mind, let alone a perfect being." (32)

"All that can be done at this stage in the history of science is to argue for a recognition of the problem, not to offer solutions." (33)

Consciousness

If we take the problem of consciousness seriously and draw out its implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture. (35)

Nagel provides a brief history of what has brought us to our present predicament.

               

                -Mind-Body Problem arising from the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

               

                -Descartes and Galileo propose that physical science should provide mathematically precise                          quantitative descriptions of an external reality extended in time and space and the laws which    govern it.

               

                -Subjective appearances were assigned to the mind and secondary qualities like color, sound                        and smell were to be analyzed relationally in terms of the power of physical things acting on the         senses to produce the appearances in the mind.

                (This essentially left out human intentions and purposes) (36)

 

"It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind- as well as human intentions and purposes- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop." (36)

 

                Developments in neurophysiology and molecular biology have encouraged the hope of including the mind in a single conception of the world. Descartes disagreed with this view and thought that mind and matter are both real and irreducibly distinct, though they interact.

 

                -For several centuries after Descartes, dualism expressed itself primarily in the form of idealism -                "the view that mind is the ultimate reality and the physical world is in some way reducible to it."

               

                -Berkley rejected the primary-secondary quality distinction (logical positivism)and held that          physical things are ideas in the mind of God.

 

                -Idealism was largely displaced in later twentieth century analytic philosophy by attempts at         unification in the opposite direction, starting from the physical."(37)

 

Nagel then gives some examples of strategies which attempt to reduce the mental to the physical.

Strategies of reducing the mental to the physical

One strategy for putting the mental into the physical world picture is conceptual behaviorism. It is offered as an analysis of the real nature of mental concepts. Mental phenomena were identified variously with behavior, behavioral dispositions, or forms of behavioral organization.

 

Another version of this associated with Ryle and inspired by Wittgenstein, mental phenomena were not identified with anything, either physical or nonphysical; the names of mental states and processes were said not to be referring expressions.

 

-Mental concepts were explained in terms of their observable behavioral conditions of application, behavioral criteria or assertability conditions rather than behavioral truth conditions.

               

All these strategies are essentially verificationist, i.e., they assume that all that needs to be said about the content of a mental statement is what would verify or confirm it, or warrant its assertion, from the point of view of an observer.

                                "In one way or another, they reduce the mental attributions to the

                                externally observable conditions on the basis of which we attribute mental

                                states to others. If successful, this would obviously place the mind comfortably in the                                       physical world." (38)

 

"All these theories are insufficient as analyses of the mental, because they leave out something essential that lies beyond the externally observable grounds for attributing mental states to others, namely, the aspect of mental phenomena that is evident, from the first person, inner point of view of the conscious subject."(the taste of sugar, the way red looks, how anger feels)

 

                Behaviorism fails to account for the mental because it leaves out the inner mental state itself.

 

                                -In the 1950s an alternative, nonanalytic route to materialism was proposed. This was psycho-physical identity theory (identity theory). The theory was proposed by U.T. Place and J. J. C. Smart, not as conceptual analysis but as scientific hypothesis.

 

It held that mental events are physical events in the brain: Ϫ= φ (where Ϫ s a mental event (taste/pain) and φ is the corresponding physical event in the central nervous system)

               

                -The trouble is that this non-analytic identity raises a further question: What is it about φ that     makes it also Ϫ) (I believe this is referred to as the explanatory gap in Philosophy of mind. I

 

The explanatory gap is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine for the difficulty that physicalist theories of mind have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced (Wikipedia)

"Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels. (Wikipedia)

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem".[2]((Wikipedia)    

"Defenders of identity theory, in spite of their wish to avoid relying on conceptual analysis, tended to be pulled back into different kinds of analytical behaviorism, in order to analyze the mental character of brain processes in a way that avoided dualism." (38)

                -A causal element was added to the analysis: "the inner state that typically causes certain              behavior and is caused by certain stimuli."

                A few strategies that have taken this form are causal behaviorism, functionalism, and others. These theories try to account for mental events as directly referring to states of the brain.

 

 

Problems with causal behaviorism, functionalism and others

-All of these strategies are unsatisfactory because they clearly leave out human intentions and purposes- exactly what Descartes and Galileo left out in order to form the modern concept of the physical, namely subjective experiences.

 

-Another problem with this line of thought was noticed by Saul Kripke.

 

Identity theorists took as their model for Ϫ= φ other theoretical identities like "Water = H20", or "Heat = Molecular Motion.".

-Kripke argued that those identities were necessary truths (although not conceptual a priori), whereas the Ϫ/φ relation appears to be contingent.  (This was the basis for Descartes' argument for dualism) (40)

 

-Experiences like taste however seem to be extra, contingently related to the brain state- something produced rather than constituted by the brain state. Therefore, it cannot be identical to the brain state in the way water identical to H2O.

 

Nagel notes that these dead ends have lead some philosophers to eliminative materialism- "the suggestion that mental events, like ghosts and Santa Claus, don't exist at all." (41)

Nagel suggests that we will have to abandon materialism in our pursuit of a unified world picture.

                                                "Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable
                                                components of reality not described by the physical sciences." (41)

-Nagel notes that we should be suspicious of attempts to solve the mind-body problem with concepts and methods used to understand very different kinds of things.

 

"We should expect theoretical progress in this area to require a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory, the introduction of electromagnetic fields into physics-or the original scientific revolution itself, which, because of its built-in restrictions, can't result in a "theory of everything." (42)

                -The failure of reductionism in the philosophy of mind has implications that extend beyond the   mind-problem .

 

"Psychophysical reductionism is an essential component of a broader naturalistic program, which cannot survive without it. This naturalistic program is both metaphysical and scientific." (43)

 

Nagel notes that many and perhaps most philosophers of mind are still committed to the reductionist project.

 

The picture of how consciousness is to be included as part of the physical world: "It is included in virtue of the existence of physical organisms capable of certain kinds of behavioral interaction with the world, which is in turn explained by genetic variation and natural selection."

 

"The evolution of life must be at least part of the explanation of the development and forms of consciousness."

 

"If evolutionary theory is a purely physical theory, then it might in principle provide the framework for a physical explanation of the appearance of behaviorally complex animal organisms with central nervous systems. But subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, would not be part of this story; it would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution- even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness." (44-45)

 

Nagel states that it is not an explanation to just say that the physical process of evolution has resulted in x,  and that it just a brute fact of nature that creatures are conscious in familiar ways.

"Merely to identify a cause is not to provide a significant explanation"

 

Nagel states that the conscious character of these organisms is one of their most important features. "The explanation of the coming into existence of such creatures must include an explanation of the appearance of consciousness." (45) This cannot be a separate question, so an account of their biological evolution must explain the appearance of conscious organisms as such.

                -Since a purely materialist explanation cannot account for this then the materialist version of       evolutionary theory cannot be the whole truth.

 

Nagel claims that materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world due to its failure to account for conscious organisms included in the physical world.

 

"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." (46)

 

Nagel admits that he is placing a great deal of weight on the idea of explanation and the goal of intelligibility. He notes that not everything has an explanation  in the same way and that some things that happen in near succession have unrelated explanations.

 

Systematic features of the world however are not coincidences and cannot be regarded as brute facts, they do require an explanation.

                                               

When we become aware of facts such as regularities, patterns and functional organization, these call out for explanation, especially the more frequent they are. Knowing the immediate cause does not always make something intelligible, using the causation of consciousness by brain activity as a prime example.

                                                "Explanation, unlike causation, is not just of an event, but of an

                                                event under a description. An explanation must show why it was likely

                                                that an event of that type occurred." (47)

Nagel gives another example using a calculator- There is no physical(causal) explanation of why the device produces the right answer. To explain the result of "3 + 5 = 8", "we must refer to the algorithm governing the calculator, and the intention of the designer to give it a physical realization. (48)

(Doctrine of the 4 Causes? The Final Cause is first in conception but last in actualization- without the final cause the explanation is incomplete)

 

Nagel doesn't think that a naturalistic expansion of evolutionary theory which accounts for consciousness would have to refer to the intentions of a designer." It would however have to offer some account of why the appearance of conscious organisms, and not merely of behaviorally complex organisms, was likely." (48) 

 

"I find the confidence among the scientific establishment that the whole scenario will yield to a purely chemical explanation hard to understand, except as a manifestation of an exiomatic commitment to reductive materialism." (49)

 

                "I am setting aside outright dualism, which would abandon hope for an integrated explanation."

Nagel wants an integrated explanation for consciousness as well as biological complexity