by Terry Scambray<\/p>\n
New Oxford Review<\/em><\/p>\n A Review of\u00a0Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False<\/i>, Thomas Nagel. Oxford University Press, 2012.\u00a0 128 pages.\u00a0 $24.95<\/strong><\/p>\n In Mind & Cosmos<\/i>, the highly regarded philosopher Thomas Nagel can’t make up his mind about how to explain his own mind and the minds of the rest of us. However, he is sure that the materialist explanation of mind is, well, merely a mental construct or as he writes,\u00a0 it “is almost certainly false.”<\/p>\n In his longest chapter called “Consciousness”, Nagel, a\u00a0 professor of\u00a0 philosophy and law at New York University,\u00a0 recounts how the “mind-body problem” arose out of \u00a0the 17th century scientific revolution” which necessarily involved reducing things down to their tiniest physical and chemical parts and then discovering what made them tick.<\/p>\n But can such “scientific” reductionism be applied to the mind and consciousness ?\u00a0 Not really because applying quantitative measurements to the unquantifiable is actually a misapplication<\/i> which results in a degenerative form of science sometimes called, “scientism”.\u00a0\u00a0 And “scientism” is but another example of\u00a0 the adage: If you are devoted to using a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.<\/p>\n Yes, it remains paradoxical that science has never been able to objectify something essential to its entire enterprise, mind or consciousness, which, as Nagel writes, is that “aspect of mental phenomena that is evident from the first person, inner point of view which tells you how\u00a0 sugar tastes, red looks or how anger feels”, and how to fairly and accurately evaluate a scientific experiment.<\/p>\n Of course, the mind body conundrum is a perennial issue which thinkers found puzzling even a long time prior to the 17th century.\u00a0\u00a0 Nonetheless,\u00a0 Nagel yearns for a “unified world picture” which would necessarily have to include the mind and the cosmos, a goal which\u00a0 he oddly refers to as “utopian”.<\/p>\n Perhaps he thinks of this goal as “utopian” because as he concedes, “theories of everything” are restricted because science currently limits itself\u00a0 to material causes whereas the mind is an immaterial, immeasurable, unrestricted free agent.<\/p>\n Despite this limitation, Nagel ambitiously remarks that “the more encompassing a theory is, the more powerful it has to be.”\u00a0\u00a0 For this reason\u00a0 he hopes that “a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory or the original scientific revolution itself”\u00a0 will be discovered which will make the mind and consciousness amenable to scientific inspection.<\/p>\n Whether quantum theory, as one example, can help to explain mind is discussed by the always worthwhile Raymond Tallis in his exhaustive 2011 book,\u00a0 Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity<\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0 As Tallis puts it, quantum theory seems to solve problems that the classical understanding of the material world failed to solve because\u00a0 “with quantum theory spooky things appear to happen at a distance from one another, particles have no absolute position,” features that remind us of our non-material minds.<\/p>\n But this too is a cul-de-sac.\u00a0 For the extraordinary behavior of matter assumes an observer which is the “object” that this theorizing intends to explain in the first place.<\/p>\n As Tallis, a “humanist atheist” like Nagel, concludes:\u00a0 “There is at present nothing in matter as understood through natural sciences\u00a0 – no, not even in the wildest reaches of quantum mechanics – that would lead one\u00a0 to expect matter to assume forms so that it might be able to formulate universal laws that encompass its own existence.”<\/p>\n Regardless,\u00a0 Nagel’s hoped for explanation of mind, be it a revolutionary concept or science fiction, whichever, is not clarified enough so that one can only guess at what he has in his own mind.\u00a0\u00a0 So the perennial question remains: Can the human mind explain itself, ever<\/i> ?<\/p>\n I can’t imagine how.\u00a0 Only something outside of\u00a0 itself and smarter and more encompassing than itself can explain itself, which I always thought philosophers were put on the payroll to remind us of.\u00a0 After all, thinkers from Socrates to the present have discussed this limitation not to mention other human limits; and consummate writers going back to the Old Testament, Homer and on up to Dante, Shakespeare as well as moderns like Proust and Joyce, the latter two in a streaming and grainy way, have tried to convey that inner mental voice which each of us solitarily hears.\u00a0\u00a0 Even at that, as we read these and other writers, we are relying, inescapably, on our own isolated minds, once again.<\/p>\n Nagel’s probes or “speculations”, the word he consistently uses, are characteristic of the style of much of the book which is sketchy when it isn’t down right contradictory.<\/p>\n For example,\u00a0 while he trashes Darwinian natural selection as a phony explanation for how minds were made, nonetheless, he continues to believe that natural selection has explanatory power.\u00a0\u00a0 And though he correctly understands that a materialist explanation of mind destroys any notion of “values” while skewing even the baked in imperatives of logic, nonetheless, he sees Darwinian evolution as the only credible support for materialistic solutions to all the big issues, including the mind problem.<\/p>\n And while he is grateful to individuals like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer for showing the weaknesses in evolutionary explanations,\u00a0 Nagel notes that they both “are motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs.”\u00a0\u00a0 And whereas David Berlinski is also given a pat on the head for dissecting Darwin’s theory without having ulterior “religious” motives, he is also commended for refraining from advocating design.<\/p>\n Apparently Dr. Nagel, wants to have his cake and eat it too.\u00a0 Read, for example, this sentence of his:\u00a0 “Those who have seriously criticized these arguments have certainly shown that there are ways to resist the design conclusion; but the general force of the negative part of the intelligent design position\u00a0 – skepticism about the likelihood of the orthodox reductive view, given the available evidence – does not appear to me to have been destroyed in these exchanges.”<\/p>\n Hard to track ?<\/p>\n Definitely.\u00a0 And that’s because “seriously criticized” and “certainly shown” are pumped up phrases which go flat when followed by swarming, confusing negatives like “negative part . .\u00a0 . skepticism of the likelihood . . . does not appear . . . to have been destroyed . .\u00a0 .”<\/p>\n While we do get the point that the design argument deserves consideration,\u00a0 the gummy syntax of this sentence is representative of\u00a0 the style of much of the book.<\/p>\n Nagel follows up this sentence with the limp observation, “At least, the question should be regarded as open.”\u00a0\u00a0 But, really, are there any worthwhile questions that are not<\/i> open?<\/p>\n Yet I do find this book interesting for several reasons despite its equivocations.<\/p>\n For one thing, Nagel offers a good, brief history of the failures of the various materialistic ways of explaining mind, including assorted behaviorisms which try to sandwich the mind and brain together into one neat entity so as to analyze it as a physical, chemical entity.<\/p>\n But as Nagel points out, the mind and brain are not like water which is composed of H2O and without which water could not exist.\u00a0 And this is because the taste and feel of water “seem to be something extra, contingently <\/i>\u00a0related to the brain state – something produced<\/i> rather than constituted by the brain state,\u00a0 So it cannot be identical to the brain state in the way that water is identical to H2O.”<\/p>\n Thus the iconic French philosopher,\u00a0 Rene Descartes’ classical distinction between mind \/ body “dualism introduced at the birth of modern science may be harder to get out of than many people have imagined.”\u00a0\u00a0 And because this knot is so difficult to untie, some thinkers simply want to discard mental events, calling them illusions.\u00a0\u00a0 Nagel disagrees; he\u00a0 thinks that if we want a unified picture of reality, we will have to abandon materialism and face the fact that, “Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable components of reality not describable by the physical sciences.”<\/p>\n Nagel also correctly realizes that Darwinian materialism is incompatible with the existence of\u00a0 rational minds.\u00a0\u00a0 Darwin, equivocal as he also was, never squared this circle though he touches on this contradiction in On the<\/i> Origin of \u00a0Species<\/i> where he wonders about the reliability of his own mind since he thought that it had evolved from an ape’s mind.\u00a0\u00a0 C.S. Lewis also saw that if\u00a0 mind is an accidental accretion of matter, then it could not be trusted.\u00a0 In our own day, Phillip Johnson, the law professor, and Alvin Plantinga, the philosopher, have also persuasively shown that materialistic determinism is self refuting;\u00a0 that is, if our brains are a stew of particles, stirred around by physical forces, then we are automatons without free will and a desire for truth so, once again,\u00a0 our ideas would be unreliable. Strangely for a philosopher, Nagel does not understand that Darwinian evolution is materialist philosophy masquerading as science.\u00a0 That is,\u00a0 evolution is not supported by “empirical evidence” as Nagel thinks, but rather the findings in paleontology, embryology and genetics contradict evolution.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Evolution, as it turns out,\u00a0 is supported by a materialist philosophy that restricts “science” to offering only material explanations for phenomena, the very same limitation that Nagel correctly sees as restricting explanations for mind and consciousness!<\/p>\n However, since Nagel thinks that evolution is empirically supported, he attacks it through its metaphysical backdoor.\u00a0 As he puts it, “since moral realism is true, a Darwinian account of\u00a0 the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in favor of it.”<\/p>\n But where does Nagel’s faith in “moral realism”, which is to say absolutes, originate if he still clings to a materialist explanation like evolution ?\u00a0\u00a0 Is his belief in absolutes something subjective, a mental construct, a premise that others can share with him only as a matter of faith?<\/p>\n I wonder how Nagel and his colleagues in the academy would react to this argument, “Since God is real, a materialistic, Darwinian account of\u00a0 origins based on natural selection must be false” ?<\/p>\n This argument is stronger than Nagel’s because Christianity offers a narrative, an ontology as well as a teleology which has been particularly energized in the last 100 years by the discovery in the organic cell of millions of\u00a0 molecular parts whose complex, information rich features are difficult to square with a materialistic, step-by-step mechanical explanation like Darwinian evolution.<\/p>\n For that matter, the complexity of cellular life is widely discussed.\u00a0 Take the November 2012 edition of Nature<\/i>, perhaps the world’s most respected science journal, in which a University of California neuroscientist, Alysson Muotri, comments on the uniqueness of the human brain in comparison to other complex organs like the heart and liver. As Professor Muotri remarks, “We look at the brain and we think about the tissue, but actually it seems like lots of tissues in one, because the cells are so heterogeneous. It’s almost like every cell was there for a purpose.”<\/p>\n I offer this quote as only a handy, current example of a scientist remarking on the purposefulness found in nature.\u00a0\u00a0 For during the last 100 years as science has amassed an increasing amount of knowledge, statements like this occur\u00a0 frequently in the literature of the life sciences and cosmology especially, \u00a0not to mention other disciplines.<\/p>\n Professor Nagel, apparently, has an aversion to design even though \u00a0he understands the limitations of a materialist world view. \u00a0Perhaps the reason\u00a0 he fails to see this limitation is the same reason that he wrongly associates intelligent design with “religious” belief and also the reason that he slights traditional teleology, trying as he does to wedge in “natural teleology” as an\u00a0 explanation for the symmetry in nature that he heartily concedes is “biased toward the marvelous.”<\/p>\n His rationale for his neo-materialist position is that he “lacks the sensus divinitatis <\/i>that enables – indeed compels – so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .”<\/p>\n But this self imposed limit is ironic, indeed, considering that\u00a0 Nagel’s major theme is that\u00a0 mental states are non-transferable.\u00a0 That is,\u00a0 “I gotta’ be me ! “<\/i>\u00a0 (Can you “hear” Sammy Davis, Jr. \u00a0belting this out ?!)\u00a0\u00a0 And, likewise, “You gotta’ be you<\/i>“.\u00a0 So perhaps Professor Nagel ought\u00a0 to get inside the sensus divinitatis <\/i>before he concludes that he is ill fitted for that necessarily subjective role, as all mental states irreducibly are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A Review of\u00a0Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Thomas Nagel. Oxford University Press, 2012.\u00a0 128 pages.\u00a0 $24.95<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[87,85,297],"tags":[1067],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Ae","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":404,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/silenced-partner-two-books-on-alfred-wallace\/","url_meta":{"origin":6090,"position":0},"title":"Silenced Partner: Two Books on Alfred Wallace","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray Touchstone A review of: Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's Theory of Life Challenged Darwinism\u00a0by Michael A. Flannery (Erasmus Press, 2008.\u00a0 216 pp.) Includes an abridged version of Wallace's\u00a0The World of Life, with an Introduction by Flannery and a Forward by William A. Dembski.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1167,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/evidence-against-the-evidence\/","url_meta":{"origin":6090,"position":1},"title":"Evidence Against the Evidence","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 24, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Meyer's new book reveals the irrational about evolution by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review A review of\u00a0Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design\u00a0by Stephen C. Meyer.\u00a0 Harper One, 2009. In a scene that could be straight out of a Henry James novel, Stephen Meyer, then an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terry Scambray"","block_context":{"text":"Terry Scambray","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/terry-scambray\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6666,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/book-review-intelligent-design-or-unintelligent-design\/","url_meta":{"origin":6090,"position":2},"title":"Book Review: Intelligent Design or Unintelligent Design?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 24, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray \/\/\u00a0New Oxford Review, October 2013\u00a0 Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Stephen C. Meyer. Harper One, 2013. 412 pp. \u00a0Stephen Meyer has followed his highly acclaimed,\u00a0Signature in the Cell, with a worthy sequel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The sequel,\u00a0Darwin's Doubt,\u00a0blends the findings from molecular\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7842,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-truth-about-science-and-religion\/","url_meta":{"origin":6090,"position":3},"title":"The Truth About Science and Religion","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 12, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray \/\/ American Thinker \u00a0 In 1925 the renowned philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead speaking to scholars at Harvard said that science originated in Christian Europe in the 13th century.\u00a0 Whitehead pointed out that science arose from \u201cthe medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via www.drroyspencer.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/God-and-scientist.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1563,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/beyond-the-scopes-trial\/","url_meta":{"origin":6090,"position":4},"title":"Beyond the Scopes Trial?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Singham's new book misses the Christian foundation of law and much more. by Terry Scambray New Oxford Review God vs. Darwin: The War between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom\u00a0by Mano Singham (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). You can judge this book by its cover. Or at least by its title.\u00a0\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terry Scambray"","block_context":{"text":"Terry Scambray","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/terry-scambray\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7573,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/book-review-a-genius-for-destructive-change\/","url_meta":{"origin":6090,"position":5},"title":"Book Review: A Genius for Destructive Change","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Terry Scambray \/\/\u00a0New Oxford Review, May\u00a02014\u00a0 Darwin: Portrait of a Genius. 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