Nagel, Thomas - Anti-Reductionism and the Natural Order

12/14/2012

Mind And Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Ch 1-2, Oxford University Press, 2012


This is the first two chapters of author's most recent book, which disputes that 'psychophysical reductionism' is the only possible unifying naturalistic understanding of the universe. For author, the key rub is the development of life, and especially the development of reason and consciousness. If this reductionism can't account for consciousness or reasoned action, author claims it is reasonable to think of mind as a fundamental feature of the universe-- irreducibly part of it-- and thus falsifying 'naturalistic reductionism'. Author admits to not having a fledged-out alternative. This attempt is more fundamentally skeptical than propositional.

In Ch 1 author claims the "neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life" (pg6) is incredible and is only a "schema for explanation, supported by some examples". Author has two questions: the first is about how life came about from dead matter at all, and the second is how reason and consciousness could have come about from then until now. Author acknowledges that there are much fewer conclusions about the first question than the second. In the following pages author states skepticism about the explanations offered by natural selection as they bear on both these questions. (pg9-10)


Author's most provocative statements about the completeness of psychophysical reductionism are on pg8, where author claims that the remarkable success of science had to do with "excluding mind from the physical world" (pg8). This must end "in the long run" if the mind is to become part of the world, thus author is seeking a more complete view. Author wishes to keep two standards during this discussion: first: that remarkable events should be considered non-accidental, and second: that there is one unifying 'single natural order' (pg7).

Author's general frame of argument seems to be to install the irreducibility of the mental into the world but simultaneously to avoid dualism, idealism, or theism (pg14-6). Author lays out the first issue to consider: the intelligibility of the world. It is a background assumption of science that the world is intelligible to our perceptual apparatus (at least some of that apparatus at some times under some conditions) (pg16). There are two options here: one is that we have limited ability to fully understand the world and will be left with mysterious brute facts (pg17). The other option is that the world's intelligibility is a 'deep' part of the explanation of the way the world works, something like a principle of sufficient reason. Here author aligns with Plato, Schelling and Hegel.

A response to this is to have the natural reductionist encompass the intelligibility of the world to the human mind into the physicalist/reductionist picture (pg18-20). Author is clearly not satisfied with this approach because it doesn't take meaning, value, mind, and consciousness to be fundamental elements of the universe (pg20), which doesn't include 'the evident facts about ourselves'. Author pauses to claim quite explicitly that there is no room for theism in this book (pg21-6), as it neglects the unification and explanation that author seeks, instead installing a being that is supernatural. As author revisits the issue of intelligibility, the theistic picture just gives brute facts and neglects the /why/, but the naturalistic picture is not 'reassuring enough' that our capacities for understanding are reliable (pg27-8). Further, author is troubled by objective moral truths that seem to be orphaned by the naturalistic reductionist account. Because of our certainty in these facts about the world, "it seems reasonable to run the test equally in the opposite direction: namely, to evaluate hypotheses about the universe and how we have come into existence by reference to ordinary judgments in which we have very high confidence." (pg29)