Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
A question addressed is how can consciousness be explained, and it is no surprise that a scientist and a philosopher disagree. Nagel is an atheist but he thinks something more than evolution and natural selection is needed and he suggests a natural teleology that does not depend on any agent's intentions but are just laws of nature that we don't know about yet. Similar to the reviewer I don't buy it, and I particularly like this quote that illustrates why I much prefer science over philosophy:Instead Nagel's conclusion rests largely on the strength of his intuition. His intuition recoils from the claimed plausibility of neo-Darwinism and that, it seems, is that. (Richard Dawkins has called this sort of move the argument from personal incredulity.) But plenty of scientific truths are counterintuitive (does anyone find it intuitive that we're hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour?) and a scientific education is, to a considerable extent, an exercise in taming the authority of one's intuition. Nagel never explains why his intuition should count for so much here.The reviewer summarizes Nagel's positions as:
Nagel is deeply skeptical that any species of materialist reductionism can work. Instead, he concludes, progress on consciousness will require an intellectual revolution at least as radical as Einstein's theory of relativity.But I prefer the reviewer's own thoughts on the subject:
For there might be perfectly good reasons why you can't imagine a solution to the problem of consciousness. As the philosopher Colin McGinn has emphasized, your very inability to imagine a solution might reflect your cognitive limitations as an evolved creature. The point is that we have no reason to believe that we, as organisms whose brains are evolved and finite, can fathom the answer to every question that we can ask. All other species have cognitive limitations, why not us? So even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.I have felt this way for a long time and it's nice to see a scientist express it so clearly. Actually it seems so obvious to me I cannot understand why anyone would think otherwise!