3/1/13
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist
Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Mind And Cosmos, by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, has
created a fair amount of stir, arguing that science, as we know it, can't
explain things like consciousness, or reason, or even, when it comes down to
it, life itself. Science, as per Nagel, fails at what I will call the big
"phase changes" (say, from chemistry to biology, and from matter to
mind). Hence, he says, it's time to look for other types of causality.
No, not religion — Nagel is secular, with an avowed distaste
for any flavor of theism. No, not even intelligent design — he's too
intelligent, though he likes that intelligent design keeps the door open. Open
for what? He doesn't know, exactly. We humans can't know, yet. To the extent
that he does say, it's a throwback to the sort of philosophy that puts mind at
the center of things, the view that maintains the universe made for mind, from
the get-go, always intended it, so that through our minds the cosmos can know
itself.
You get that stuff from Aristotle on to Hegel. It's potent
when they put it forth, a secular rebuff and alternative to religious faith:
the universe is inherently meaningful, has been constructed with some end in
sight, an end that, moreover, involves us. (Nagel puts a lot of emphasis on
ends, final causes, teleology. He wants to take teleology out of the
metaphysical scrap heap and put it back into play along with other kinds of
causes.) Nagel’s arguments though, unlike Aristotle’s or Hegel's, are neither
potent nor persuasive. They are, if anything, exhausting rather than, as with
Hegel, exhaustive. Perhaps they are meant to be. They are meant not to tell us
what we do not know or to put forth what we might yet come to understand but to
place speed bumps in the path of what we think we know, already, at this time.
They are, at best, cautionary.
Nagel keeps referring to and contesting with "materialist"
science. I'm sure he's using the accepted parlance, in this debate. But what is
"materialism"? What does it mean these days? Is DNA material, including
the vast amount of what was considered junk DNA that is now regarded as
freighted with crucial, dimly understood, functionality? How about neural
wiring, the billions of connections in our brains? Are they what is meant by
material?
What is material? Are quarks material? Energy? Electricity?
What does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to say "materialism"?
Is information material? Maybe materialism is just the philosophical position
that denies any divine being, any disembodied mind or spirit, any part in the
explanatory process. If so, "materialism" might not be the best word
for what is essentially a defensive posture.
There is a huge amount we do not know, including at the
moment, momentously, what most of the universe is made of — dark energy and matter.
We'll get to know more, I have no doubt. But I am not in the least
uncomfortable with the idea that there will be plenty we may never know. Let us
strive for a unified theory, a theory of everything. Let there be no end of
fruitful effort in that direction, nor will there be. But if in the end there
is a disjunction between the cosmos in its vastness and complexity and these
minds of ours that have evolved on earth, I see no problem. I think such a
disjunction, if anything, fitting, despite eternal efforts to overcome it, and
the philosophical conniptions it inspires.
***
***
Nagel's best known work prior to Mind And Cosmos is
"What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" [http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nagel.htm]
Can humans and other non-bats know what it is like to be a
bat? "What is it like" is his key phrase. In a way, it is Nagel's
version of Wittgenstein’s famous "is the case", as used in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. "The world," writes Wittgenstein,
"is everything that is the case". That way of talking was meant to,
and did, for a time, reframe and reform discussion. "What is the
case" was meant to exclude things that one would not say had met the hard
test of being the case — angels, all manner of metaphysical and/or religious
wishful thinking. All that pretty transparently was not the case.
As if one could not soon enough adapt to the new
philosophical style sheet and say: the Trinity is the case, absolute evil is
the case, Yahweh, Platonic forms, angels and demons (all over) the case.
"The case" was Wittgenstein’s peremptory and surgically dismissive
way of trying to get language to make decisions language alone could not make.
It was a shortcut that detoured back to itself, to language.
Nagel's thrust in "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?"
is that we can't know what it is like to be a bat. We can describe the bat down
to exquisite zoological detail — the wings, the sixth sense, remarkable sonar —
but never really know what is like to be such a creature. His point is that
whatever we know scientifically, from the laws of physics on through chemistry,
biology, zoology and within zoology, chiropterology (the study of bats), can
never be sufficient to explain subjectivity. No amount of life science can tell
us what it is like to be a bat, can give us entry to its strange point of view.
Nagel alludes to other sorts of impasses. We can never know
what it's like, if we have sight, to be blind. We can never transmit the idea
of color to one who cannot see. Or, implicitly, to someone deaf, communicate
what it is like to hear.
In "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" Nagel stops
short of the obvious, existential, intra-human, impasse. What is like to be
you? How can I know? Forget bats: we, you and I, being of the same species,
presumably having language and allowing for the moment that the senses
appropriate to our kind are intact, do we, how can we, even so, ever know each
other? Do I know what is like to be you, or you me?
This impasse has long provoked and irritated art and
literature. Nagel steers clear of art and literature. He draws back from the
existential, impasse — the I-Thou fissure — that would inevitably invoke them.
He is more comfortable with the sort of impasse between what it is like to be
Homo Sapiens and what it is like to be bat, and in using such impasses to tear
away at the whole edifice of scientific explanation, from Big Bang through
natural selection to neuroscience. If science cannot find ways across such gaps
and fissures then it cannot, despite enormous achievements, in principle, be
anything like comprehensive. So he says.
It strikes me that there is something disingenuous about
this line of attack. It is as if Nagel has never heard of Gödel, never
assimilated what Gödel established for mathematics — and implicitly, perhaps,
for other intellectual endeavors — namely that any strong explanatory system
will necessarily, in principle, display fissures, breaks, gaps, and suffer from
incompleteness. Nagel excludes I-Thou and the Incompleteness Theorem. Such
exclusions, and others, give a sterile feel to his writing. His is an emetic style
of philosophy, one that depends on self-purgation.
For Nagel, something else must be going on, something else
intended by an unnamed and for now unnamable intender. Darwinians like Daniel
Dennett and Richard Dawkins speak of design without a designer, and try to show
how evolution — humanity, human consciousness — have come into being without
any grand intention to start it off or help it along. Nagel wants to put a
designer back into the mix, though he's vague about just where. For him, the
cosmos was willed — that is for him the only alternative to materialism — though
he shies away from saying who or what willed it, or why.
(Somehow uprooting mind, human mind, from the center of
things, is a more arduous project than Copernicus and Galileo faced when they
uprooted the earth from the center of the cosmos. The earth is no longer the
center of the cosmos — that is the consensus, common knowledge — but for some
thinkers mind, however reformulated, won't be banished from centrality and is
always reconstituting itself at the core. It's hard to imagine what sort of
instrument, analogous to the telescope, would show definitively that our minds
— or even an indescribably superior analogue to them — does not emanate crucial
and continuous [cosmic] intent.)
As noted, Nagel's book has occasioned uproar. Leon
Wieseltier, for example, in the New Republic (3/11/2013), fulminates to the
point of apoplexy about the shoddy treatment Mind And Cosmos has received from "Darwinian
Imperialists" who deride it as nothing short of heresy. Heresy? When did
modern scientists ever gather together to expel, punish or brand as an heretic
a neo-Aristotelian of Nagel's ilk? But fulmination is as ever Wieseltier's
forte.
As for me, I think Nagel has received more patient and
considerate response than he deserves, in the New York Review of Books
[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/?pagination=false],
for example, and elsewhere. I think the tribe of philosophers has largely resolved
to treat him well, to reason with him, to act as if his questions and
complaints, couched as they in a stringent code of discourse, add up to more
than Hamlet's admonition:
There are more things in heaven and earth, . . . Than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.
That is true now as ever, of any philosophy and each
Horatio.
Nagel of course is entitled to focus on what he takes to be
explanatory bottlenecks in the scientific enterprise. But in the meantime, and
no matter that he did not intend it, his work has become a rallying cry for the
many who have no taste for much science in the first place and for Darwinism
least of all. Nagel may not like the theists but they do like him. He may not
have wished to empower proponents of intelligent design but it is the case that
he has been a boon to them.
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