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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False Hardcover – 22 Nov. 2012
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- ISBN-109780199919758
- ISBN-13978-0199919758
- EditionFirst Edition
- PublisherOUP USA
- Publication date22 Nov. 2012
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions14.22 x 1.78 x 21.34 cm
- Print length144 pages
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Nagels book is provocative, interesting and important ― Simon Oliver, Studies in Christian Ethics
Nagels arguments are forceful, and his proposals are bold, intriguing, and original. This, though short and clear, is philosophy in the grand manner, and it is worthy of much philosophical discussion. ― Keith Ward, The Philosophical Quarterly
This is a challenging text that should provoke much further reflection. I recommend it to anyone interested in trying to understand the nature of our existence. ― W. Richard Bowen, ESSSAT News & Reviews 23:1
[This] troublemaking book has sparked the most exciting disputation in many years... I like Nagel's mind and I like Nagel's cosmos. He thinks strictly but not imperiously, and in grateful view of the full tremendousness of existence. ― Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic
A sharp, lucidly argued challenge to today's scientific worldview. ― Jim Holt, The Wall Street Journal
Nagel's arguments against reductionism should give those who are in search of a reductionist physical 'theory of everything' pause for thought... The book serves as a challenging invitation to ponder the limits of science and as a reminder of the astonishing puzzle of consciousness. ― Science
Mind and Cosmos, weighing in at 128 closely argued pages, is hardly a barn-burning polemic. But in his cool style Mr. Nagel extends his ideas about consciousness into a sweeping critique of the modern scientific worldview. ― The New York Times
[This] short, tightly argued, exacting new book is a work of considerable courage and importance. ― National Review
Provocative... Reflects the efforts of a fiercely independent mind. ― H. Allen Orr, The New York Review of Books
Challenging and intentionally disruptive... Unless one is a scientific Whig, one must strongly suspect that something someday will indeed succeed [contemporary science]. Nagel's Mind and Cosmos does not build a road to that destination, but it is much to have gestured toward a gap in the hills through which a road might someday run. ― The Los Angeles Review of Books
A model of carefulness, sobriety and reason... Reading Nagel feels like opening the door on to a tidy, sunny room that you didn't know existed. ― The Guardian
Fascinating... [A] call for revolution. ― Alva Noe, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
The book's wider questions ― its awe-inspiring questions ― turn outward to address the uncanny cognizability of the universe around us... He's simply doing the old-fashioned Socratic work of gadfly, probing for gaps in what science thinks it knows. ― Louis B. Jones, The Threepenny Review
[Attacks] the hidden hypocrisies of many reductionists, secularists, and those who wish to have it both ways on religious modes of thinking ... Fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly. ― Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
This is an interesting and clearly written book by one of the most important philosophers alive today. It serves as an excellent introduction to debates about the power of scientific explanation. ― Constantine Sandis, Times Higher Education
... reading this book will certainly prove a worthwhile venture, as it is certain to have an inspiring effect on the reader's own attitude towards mind and the cosmos. ― Jozef Bremer, Forum Philosophicum
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- ASIN : 0199919755
- Publisher : OUP USA; First Edition (22 Nov. 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 144 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780199919758
- ISBN-13 : 978-0199919758
- Dimensions : 14.22 x 1.78 x 21.34 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 352,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 580 in Philosophy of Theology
- 831 in Science & Religion
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About the author
![Thomas Nagel](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51kxdmSFGJL._SY600_.jpg)
Thomas Nagel (/ˈneɪɡəl/; born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University in the NYU Department of Philosophy, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.
Nagel is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. Continuing his critique of reductionism, he is the author of Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against a reductionist view, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view, of the emergence of consciousness.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by en:User:Jmd442 [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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"...science and philosophy more generally, will find 'Mind and Cosmos' very rewarding...." Read more
"...on the other hand, it has been incredibly successful and enriching,for without it we would not have the technology to which we are all addicted...." Read more
"This is an interesting and courageous book given the rather abusive attacks launched by the defenders of evolutionary orthodoxy...." Read more
"...Arguments are compelling and (for me) persuasive...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the writing quality. Some find the book eloquent, well argued, and convincing. They also describe it as brilliant, intellectually quirky, and complex. However, some readers say the writing style is convoluted, confusing, and needslessly convolutes.
"...This is a short book, densely argued, and sometimes a bit repetitive. I suspect it will become regarded as an important book...." Read more
"...Nagel has written a well argued critique of materialism and reductionism and it is well worth reading...." Read more
"...However, for myself, I found Nagel's writing to be incredibly dry and difficult to get a hold on...." Read more
"This is a complex book and I wouldn’t call it an easy read...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some mention it's well worth reading for its courage to think and state the currently. However, others say that it'd be better if the ideas were developed and substantiated.
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"...Most of all it is not convincing, one never feels that the author really fully believes what he is talking about. Why is this so?..." Read more
"...a well argued critique of materialism and reductionism and it is well worth reading...." Read more
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That said, I was surprised by some aspects of Nagel's analysis. The early chapters lead one to expect that he is going to present a withering critique of materialism. However, if this was his intention, the book does not really deliver the goods. In fact, rather unusually for those who choose to attack materialism head-on, he devotes surprisingly little space to setting out a critique of physical reductionism. Instead, his approach seems to be to take the inadequacy of the materialist world view as a given, almost as though it were an unspoken assumption he can safely expect his readers to share. To state, as he does, that materialism has a 'negligible likelihood' of being true sounds eloquent, but is not, in itself, a persuasive rebuttal. This somewhat undermines Nagel's attempt, in the second half of the book, to sketch out the outlines of a possible 'naturalistic' alternative to both dualism and physical materialism. For, unless it is clear that materialism is false in at least some respects, the need for an alternative is not self-evident.
Moreover, Nagel's claim that any such naturalistic alternative would require a radical breakthrough in our conceptual understanding of the relationship between mind and the physical world also seems incorrect. There has always been an alternative to materialism and idealism - it is called monism, and it is expressed in classic form in the writings of Baruch Spinoza. But Spinoza was unequivocal in rejecting teleology, and this seems more plausible to me than Nagel's attempt to locate a form of natural teleology in a Godless universe that allegedly has no goals or objective moral values. To say of 'God or Nature' that it is entirely self-contained, and the most powerful and valuable thing that can possibly exist, is not the same thing as saying that it has goals or purposes. After all, if the cosmos has an unconstrained power to give rise to everything that could possibly exist, it is unclear why it would need to set itself external, time-dependent goals; it will deliver infinite diversity timelessly. So it is perfectly consistent to maintain, on the one hand, that the universe must have the potential to give rise to human consciousness, while at the same time denying that this is a goal Nature sets for itself. I would have found the second half of 'Mind and Cosmos' more interesting if Nagel had acknowledged this possibility and explored its implications more fully, since it clearly has a crucial bearing on the question of whether teleology is required to explain the phenomenon of mind, consciousness, and other manifestations of organised complexity.
Still, the fact that Nagel is raising these issues, and stimulating the range of responses found in these and other reviews, itself justifies the price of the book.
This book is interesting because it comes from an Atheist philosopher, who is challenging some of the most sacred and cherished beliefs of atheism. Specifically he challenges whether the reduction of all life and knowledge to smaller and smaller parts provides an adequate explanation of the world as it is, or as it is experienced in our consciousness. His conclusion is that it is not an adequate or complete explanation of how things are. He does not think this is just because of gaps in current knowledge that will eventually be filled. He thinks the idea of reducing everything to physics and chemistry is neither sensible nor justifiable, or even a rational hope.
Nagel is really pointing out a flaw in the paradigm of materialism. I think he achieves what he is trying to show, and in this he is echoing the work of many others who have challenged the attempt to reduce all life and experience to physics and chemistry.
In saying this Nagel is going against the current atheistic materialist consensus advocated strongly by many of the disciples of Dawkins. They will dislike this book and think it is wrong -as they deny the existence of anything that is not material as nonsense, no existence and utterly immaterial. They say they will alter their minds if "new evidence emerges to support extra-ordinary claims"; but they have such tight rules of evidence that there's no type of evidence they could admit as credible.
Nagel has written a well argued critique of materialism and reductionism and it is well worth reading. It joins a growing list of significant books such as Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity and Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience that challenge the idea that we are nothing but physical and chemical reactions. I think he achieves the demonstration of the incompleteness of materialism well. I am less sure his suggested alternatives are fully successful.
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This is an important recent work in which he demonstrates that evolution almost certainly has a purpose, against the views of most hard-core scientists and evolutionary psychologists, who consider its processes to be totally random. (This book was savaged by reductive materialist critics such as Steven Pinker & others who support scientism.)
This puts him in line with some of the "intelligent design" theorists who posit that God has designed the universe with a specific evolutionary purpose in mind.
Nagel, however, declares himself an atheist who is only suggesting a "natural teleology" — that is, an as-yet unrealized aim in nature's evolutionary processes. This "telos" or aim may be nothing more than increasing complexity, but Nagel goes so far as to suggest that it's more likely to do with evolving knowledge and higher states of consciousness.
His arguments are clear and irresistible. His conclusions are profound.
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Se engana se alguém acha que esse filosófo ateu vai ceder quanto as suas convicções!
Não sou ateu,mas apreciei muito suas reflexões e criticas! Muitos outros autores ateus poderiam aprender com sua concisão, objetividade e principalmente polidez ao lidar com outras opniões!
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Despite the surprisingly short span of pages in the book, the arguments are hard to digest because they demand a fairly sizable familiarity with contemporary arguments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of evolutionary biology. I expect this will make the book a delight to read for those with such familiarity but challenging for those without. While the footnotes and references in the book are relatively sparse, the works cited are well-chosen and successfully do the heavy-lifting where necessary. For example, Nagel refers the reader to Michael Behe, Steven Meyer, and David Berlinski--all formidable thinkers affiliated with the Discovery Institute--when he draws attention to empirical challenges to neo-Darwinism. Nagel does not attempt to summarize these respective challenges but rather expects the reader to follow the citations on his or her own. This decision renders the book more fluid for those of us familiar with these works, but may leave the less-familiar reader perplexed by Nagel's empirical doubts about neo-Darwinism.
Nagel's efforts to embrace the quality of arguments offered by those friendly (or at least not hostile) to intelligent design, while simultaneously rejecting the inference to design himself, is refreshingly commendable. Here, Nagel embodies the sage advice of the late Robert Nozick who wrote the following in Anarchy, State, and Utopia:
"I like to think intellectual honesty demands that, occasionally at least, we go out of our way to confront strong arguments opposed to our views. How else are we to protect ourselves from continuing in error? It seems only fair to remind the reader that intellectual honesty has its dangers; arguments read perhaps at first in curious fascination may come to convince and even to seem natural and intuitive. Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth" (x-xi).
Meyer's lengthy volume Signature in the Cell (which Nagel received scorn for recommending in 2009) squeezes on the conspicuous problem of reconciling the sophisticated self-reproducing cell with inert material antecedents governed solely by chance and natural law. Nagel rightly recognizes that Meyer's treatment of the problem is provocative grounds for harboring doubts about the purely materialst account of the cell's origin. Nagel, though, leaves it up to the reader to consult Signature for the substance of Meyer's argument. Here's a representative sample of Meyer's account in Signature:
"If we assume that a minimally complex cell needs at least 250 proteins of, on average, 150 amino acids and that the probability of producing just one such protein is 1 in 10^164 as calculated above, then the probability of producing all the necessary proteins needed to service a minimally complex cell is 1 in 10^164 multiplied by itself 250 times, or 1 in 10^41,000. This kind of number allows a great amount of quibbling about the accuracy of various estimates without altering the conclusion. The probability of producing the proteins necessary to build a minimally complex cell--or the genetic information necessary to produce those proteins--by chance is unimaginably small" (213).
In his previous works The View from Nowhere and The Last Word, Nagel firmly established himself as a serious philosophical realist. Nagel labored extensively in The View from Nowhere to include the reality of subjective states in our ontology:
"I have argued that the seductive appeal of objective reality depends on a mistake. It is not the given. Reality is not just objective reality. Sometimes, in the philosophy of mind but also elsewhere, the truth is not to be found by travelling as far away from one's personal perspective as possible" (27).
Nagel fortified his philosophical realism in The Last Word by attacking popular forms of skepticism--subjectivism and relativism:
"Many forms of relativism and subjectivism collapse into either self-contradiction or vacuity--self-contradiction because they end up claiming that nothing is the case, or vacuity because they boil down to the assertion that anything we say or believe is something we say or believe" (6).
In Mind and Cosmos, he continues this tradition with particular emphasis on consciousness and mental properties, like reason and value. His treatment of this task bears the marks of a man honestly attempting to reconcile what is plainly evident about this world with systematic findings of science and mathematics. Nagel insists that there must be a fit between theory and lived life--if ever the two are in conflict, it is theory that must revise itself, not the realities of lived life. Here, he is diametrically opposed to views such as those espoused by Susan Blackmore in Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Blackmore writes:
"We can hang on to the way [the self] feels and assume that a persisting self or soul or spirit exists...or we can reject any persisting entity that corresponds to our feeling of being a self. I think that intellectually we have to take this last path. The trouble is that it is very hard to accept in one's personal life....It means accepting that every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction...This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice" (81).
Nagel, as I suspect most conscious beings do, steadfastly refuses to allow theory to dictate the absurd proposition that he needs to "practice" denying his own selfhood. For Nagel, the mind is neither reducible to the brain nor an epiphenomon of the brain merely because materialistic theory requires it; rather, the mind (including its ineliminative subjective nature) is a bona fide ingredient of the natural world, and whatever theory of reality aims to correctly explain this fact must accept mind as it actually is:
"Materialist naturalism leads to reductionist ambitions because it seems unacceptable to deny the reality of all those familiar things that are not at first glance physical. But if no plausible reduction is available, and if denying reality to the mental continues to be unacceptable, that suggests that the original premise, materialist naturalism, is false, and not just around the edges" (Mind and Cosmos, 15).
Such a stance is radical only in the sense that it resists the predominant commitments of the age-- not radical in the sense that it runs afoul of philosophical coherence. What is remarkable about Nagel's project is that he keeps his sights steadily aimed at the very reality we are attempting to explain. Not only are we interested in the very fabric of this thing we call consciousness, but we also want to know how in the world it is able to direct its awareness onto a myriad of subjects (intentionality); process raw data into holistic, abstract, and non-immediate generalizations about the world (cognition); and contort thoughts and behaviors into alignment with stance-independent maxims of right and wrong, good and bad (values). Rather than deny the existence of these features or appeal to some future, unknown material process that designates these features as physical "residues" of one sort or another, he takes them as fundamental elements of nature. As such, he resolutely maintains that these features must be explained, not explained away.
A particularly formidable challenge to neo-Darwinism Nagel mentioned in The Last Word and repeated in Mind and Cosmos shares the philosophical stage with Alvin Plantinga, who crystallized the argument in his 2011 work Where the Conflict Really Lies. The argument suggests that, on a Darwinian evolutionary account of mind, only cognitive functions (e.g. beliefs) that improve survival fitness will be "seen" by natural selection; the content of the beliefs--e.g. whether or not the beliefs are true--are of no material consequence to the selection mechanism. If Smith believes, for example, that Mercury is larger in diameter than Jupiter, but all of his other immediate perceptual faculties are operating properly such that he eats when he's hungry, finds warmth when he's cold, and runs when he sees danger, natural selection cannot select against his (apparently) mistaken belief about celestial bodies. For all we know given neo-Darwinism, that belief simply came "along for the ride" when natural selection fixed a particular brain state in Smith for other reasons. The conclusion from this argument is that our cognitive faculties, given neo-Darwinism, do not reliably produce true beliefs with respect to non-perceptual, non-immediate beliefs. Thus, whatever non-perceptual, non-immediate beliefs these cognitive faculties generate are not reliably true. Neo-Darwinism is one such non-perceptual, non-immediate belief generated by these cognitive faculties. Thus, belief in neo-Darwinism is unreliable. Hence, neo-Darwinism is self-defeating: Neo-Darwinism undermines the very cognitive faculties that generate belief in neo-Darwinism. Nagel writes in Mind and Cosmos:
"I agree with Alvin Plantinga that, unlike divine benevolence, the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole" (28).
Nagel's critique of the adequacy of the materialist, neo-Darwininian account of consciousness, cognition, and value is sharp and biting; however, his proposed alternative has received nearly universal criticism from reviewers. Nagel records his personal aversion to theistic alternatives without much by way of sustained argument. This approach is understandably disappointing to reviewers like Alvin Plantinga and William Dembski who have labored patiently to make their respective cases for theism in the face of unbridled academic hostility, but Nagel's proposed alternative--teleological naturalism--is offered by Nagel with a great deal of circumspection:
"Teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are 'biased toward the marvelous'....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" (Mind and Cosmos, 92-3).
As one who has nothing invested in any particular outcome, I welcome Nagel's bold consideration of this teleological alternative. Like him, I am not confident that it makes sense, but it is a welcome deviation from the traditional dichotomy of materialism and theism. As a matter of personal taste, I would prefer Nagel to take up the task of systematically addressing the theistic alternative though. His writings have thus far suggested to me that he is driven to atheism by conviction rather than argument. To wit, Nagel in The Last Word: "It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that" (130). Such locutions strongly lead me to suspect Nagel's teleological alternative is a reluctant solution rather than an invigorated one.
In any case, Mind and Cosmos is a great contribution to an immensely interesting and lively philosophical debate. I recommend studying the work carefully and following up on his works cited.
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At the end of the day Nagel criticizes Darwinism but he fails to come up with a convincing alternative.