The project that Thomas Nagel sets out in Mind and Cosmos, is an ambitious one. He attacks a dominant view of nature in our time, namely the materialist mechanistic one, as purportedly envisaged by the neo-darwinists. He summarizes his thoughts in the end as “I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two – though of course it may be replaced by a new consensus that is just as invalid.” (2012: 128). The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos with the dubious title of “Most Despised Science Book” of 2012. Which is ironic, since Nagel’s is not really a book on science, but on underlying philosophical issues.
Nagel notices how modern philosophy, with its accompanying science, has not come any closer to solving some of the largest and most difficult questions about the reality we live in. First and foremost, we now have a worldview that doesn’t seem able to include mind. Our increased knowledge in the physical and biological sciences, Nagel says, are due to our redefinition of terms to describe nature in solely quantitative terms, resembling the modern materialist view. This allowed us to focus our attention on these aspects of nature, but perhaps it left out its most valuable features. For the mind is thoroughly qualitative and intentional, and the knowledge we have of qualitative features of the world, doesn’t seem to fit into such a description.
Methods that rely on quantification are all well and good for their own methodological purpose, but Nagel thinks that any philosophy that is unable to include mind, is sorely lacking. Hence the book-title, Mind and Cosmos, describes how mind needs to be fundamental in our understanding of the cosmos, especially since we use mind to accumulate any learning at all about the workings of the world. Not only is mind fundamental, but the world is intelligible to our minds. The intelligibility of the world, Nagel says, is “itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are (…) The intelligibility of the world is no accident.” (p. 17). The intelligibility of the world is presupposed in every possible inquiry, so to conclude that this intelligibility alternatively as a brute fact, is essentially to undermine the validity of all inquiry.
If we have a worldview that doesn’t include mind and its capacity to direct itself to intelligible things, then we haven’t progressed much in thinking about the basic questions at all. Nagel puts it like this in the introduction:
“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.” (p. 7).
With only 128 small pages cover to cover, Mind and Cosmos is not a lengthy attempt to perform lengthy arguments to demonstrate that the materialist neo-darwinist worldview is wrong, but contains rather sketches of arguments, often pointing to the vast amounts of literature Nagel has already produced. Literature, such as the famous and much discussed 1974 paper “What is it like to be a bat”, where Nagel argues that any physical third-person investigation will still leave out subjective qualia. Nagel dedicates much of the space in the book to provide a tentative attempt of an alternative that could be acceptable within a naturalist outlook. Therefore, Mind and Cosmos should not be treated as a standalone work, but rather as a summary of arguments developed in more length elsewhere.
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel focuses his attention on four areas where a materialist neo-darwinist explanations runs short, even in principle. These are divided into the following chapters:
- The natural order
- Consciousness
- Cognition
- Value
According to Nagel, there is no way a materialist neo-darwinist will account for neither how a lifeless universe could involve into a universe with very complex living organisms in a very short amount of time, how consciousness could evolve out of matter, or the existence of rationality and value, with creatures that possess cognitive faculties such as ours, that can even comprehend reality and are motivated by value, as an objective feature of the world.
Nagel, as a prominent philosopher of mind, is especially interested in how it’s possible to defend the place of the mind in a worldview that is naturalistic, but not materialistic. As he observes: «Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world» (p. 45). But materialism, Nagel thinks, is still incompatible with the reality of the mind. He defines it like this:
“Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is such a thing. This would continue the onward march of physical science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially excluded (p. 37).”
So, by Nagel’s own accord, any materialism is either reductivist or eliminitavist. Mind then, must either be capable of being reduced to physical descriptions, or mind must be eliminated altogether, and what we call mind is really a form of illusion.
But since mind is what we use to investigate the world and achieve learning about the cosmos, including the mind itself, it cannot coherently be denied, Nagel concludes. Therefore, eliminitavism will not do, and Nagel investigates reductionism (p. 41). After rejecting this, he seems to end up looking for a version of neutral monism or panpsychism, saying that the potential for mind needs to have been latent in nature all along.
To choose one line of argument to develop in greater length, Nagel is in my view right to reject any materialist theory of the mind. Donald Davidson (1970) has performed probably the best defense for the causal efficacy of the mental in a materialist view. Davidson gives an argument against a type-type mind-brain identity theory, that materialists seems to depend upon.
According to Davidson, any event that have a causal connection, needs to be describe by a strict lawlike regularity. Therefore, if the physical and mental is not to be identified, but regarded as two things, there needs to be psycho-physical laws that describe their interaction. Davidson then uses the principle of the anomaly of the mental to show that there cannot exist such a strict law that connects mental events to physical ones.
Human linguistic behavior makes no sense, without us ascribing rationality to human beings, with a certain set of mental beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. But this understanding is always open for revision. Mind, language and behavior are so interwoven, that we cannot understand one without the other. We will never be able to read thoughts through a deep investigation of a human brain. This does not resemble anything we know from the quantitative sciences.
If the mental has any causal efficacy, this lawlike regularity cannot be a psycho-physical law, but a physical law, and not one that is described through mental concepts. If a mental event falls under a physical law, this event needs to have a physical description, and therefore be a physical event. Not one that can be described through type-type identity, but type-token.
At this point we need to ask ourselves whether this view can still be characterized as materialist. As Jaegwon Kim points out, Davidson probably ends up in a form of epiphenomenalism. That is, an epiphenomenalism of mental properties. If mental properties have no independent role, we haven’t really progressed. If mental properties have any causal efficacy, it must be such as that having one property instead of another, needs to have a causal role. My mental property of experiencing thirst, needs to play a causal role in me getting a glass of water. But with Davidson’s theory, it wouldn’t matter to any causal processes of the universe if all mental properties were removed (Kim 2011).
If Davidson’s rejects reductive attempt to even establish a type-token theory is the best version of a materialist theory, and this fails, then Nagel seems to be justified in rejecting a materialist philosophy of mind in its entirety.
But the problem of reductivism isn’t limited to the mind. Just as Nagel argues that it’s impossible to explain our rational cognitive capacities from what we share with lower animals, the same way consciousness cannot be explained in reductive terms of any sort. Even attempting to explain how life could arise from inorganic matter, has not progressed one iota during all these centuries within the materialist neo-darwinist paradigm.
And what about the appearance of reason on the evolutionary stage? A large problem with reason for a materialist, is that we know we are not locked into our own interiority. As Nagel puts it: «It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem» (p. 72). We usually regard reason as a reliable way to attain knowledge about the world. Though it’s not infallible, it is usually reliable in acquiring objective knowledge, such as identifying the capitol of France, the composer of the Four Seasons, how to do multiplication, learn the logical principle of non-contradiction or subsume particulars under universals.
With an evolutionary origin, interpreted within the materialist framework, the validity of reason seems to be nothing but a fluke. For reason to achieve “aboutness”, it needs to be directed towards ideas that it can evaluate, judge as true or false, likely or unlikely. But for “aboutness” to be a real feature of reason, it rules out materialist mechanism, as it needs to be thoroughly intentional, as in teleological.
Nagel insists in similar terms that value needs to be a real feature of the world, that cannot be stripped away by our quantitative descriptions. The goodness we experience, the symphony we hear, or the redness we see, are actual features of the world, even though it can also be explained at the level of chemicals being released in the body, harmonic sound waves or how wavelengths of reflected light. One level of explanation does not invalidate the other, but rely upon it. To locate real value in nature, Nagel turns to the ancient idea of teleology. He opens the chapter on value by stating that “The idea of teleology implies some kind of value in the result toward which things tend, even if teleology is separated from intention, and the result is not the goal of an agent who aims at it.” (p. 97). Inherent meaning then, Nagel thinks, must be a part of nature, and not something we, following Spinoza, project back onto it.
The ideas of Nagel deserve to be read in the right context, and are possible to develop even further, such as with the line with Davidson. Even though skeptics still might find good reasons to critique the arguments given in this little book, as has happened widespread since its being published in 2012, I think most of that critique can be sufficiently responded to. The critique that the reductionist method that much of our modern science builds upon, relies on category mistakes, by confusing methodology for ontology, is a strong one. Mind and qualitative features of the world cannot be explained away in quantitative terms.
The tentative status of his ideas, are also Nagel’s largest weakness. He identifies, rightly, a number of problems with the modern paradigm, but fails to do much other than hint towards a solution. The object of critique for Nagel, is really the anti-Aristotelian philosophy of nature that we’ve inherited ever since the full-blown quantification of nature by Descartes, Francis Bacon and their contemporaries. Nagel attempts to rescue us by drawing us back to recognizable elements from Aristotelian and Scholastic ideas. Then what would be more natural to end his critique of anti-Aristotelian philosophy, than with a full-blown return to Aristotelianism?
The four causes, teleology, the concepts of actuality and potentiality, the three levels of soul; vegetative, animal and rational, seems to have more potential to provide a toolbox for a philosophy of nature with everything that Nagel critiques the materialist for lacking. His flirtation with such ideas are still at an early stage in Mind and Cosmos, but there are reasons to hope that it could flourish into a full-blown romance.
References
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental Events. In L. Foster & J. W. Swanson (Eds.), Experience and Theory. (pp. 207-224). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Nagel, Thomas. (1974). What is it like to be a bat. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, 435-450
Nagel, Thomas. (2012). Mind and Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vernon, Mark. (2013, January 4). The Most Despised Science Book of 2012 is … worth reading. The Guardian. Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/jan/04/most-despised-science-book-2012