Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False 1st Edition

You've got to admire a guy who stands up against an entrenched, largely mannerless establishment and points out that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes.

This book opens a conversation that's long overdue. The book has some great soundbytes:

In response to those who say 'the universe requires no explanation, since there are infinite universes and we'd inevitably find ourselves in one of them' he replies:

"If I ask for an explanation of the fact that the air pressure in the transcontinental jet is close to that at sea level, it is no answer to point out that if it weren't, I'd be dead."

On page 83 he points out that humans value reason above physical circumstances or comforts, and the mystery of how our minds make contact with rationality cannot be explained by survival alone.

Nagel uses philosophy to touch scientific questions that have been raised by Hubert Yockey, for example, who shows that the origin of the genetic code is "possible but not knowable," because while it obeys the laws of physics, the laws of physics do not explain how any code comes into being.

On page 53 he touches on questions about the process of evolution itself - he argues for "abandoning the standard assumption that evolution is driven by exclusively physical causes." This thinking is very much in line with much of the field of bioinformatics and recent evolutionary researchers such as Jablonka, Shapiro, Kirschner and Witzany.

On page 106: "An adequate conception of the cosmos must contain the resources to account for how it could have given rise to beings capable of thinking successfully about what is good and bad, right and wrong, and discovering moral and evaluative truths that do not depend on their own beliefs."

I do have some criticisms. At numerous points he drifts into statements that are purely his own conception of how things seem to be. I also think his dismissal of theistic philosophy is unwarranted. At one points he simply states that there is no evidence for God and then moves on with no further justification... as though the matter has long been settled.

Inferences to God and philosophical arguments for God are no more easily dismissed than anything else he argues in this book; just read Antony Flew's last work. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga's review of this book is well worth a read, by the way.

It is inevitable that an author such as Nagel will be smeared by hardline Darwinists and New Atheists, who generally don't trouble themselves with such inconveniences as civility and dialogue. I give him 5 stars for the courage to take on a cabal of vocal and peevish bullies.

I salute him even more for taking a middle position between the theists and materialists, knowing that he will get flack from both sides. Mr. Nagel, thank you for writing this book.

Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" is a very important book. It may represent the moment when a leading philosopher of the mind publically admitted that the materialist assumptions of modernity - assumptions that define the basis of the scientific project - are beginning to show cracks. The cracks he points to are those found in his own area of expertise, namely (1) the inability of materialism to explain the emergence of consciousness or how consciousness works and (2) the inability of materialism to explain either how reason works or how reason maps onto the real world or how reason discovers "value" in the material universe. In this book, Nagel publically expresses his skepticism in the viability of Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the diversity and development that we see in terrestrial life, particularly with respect to its mental dimension. Nagel observes:

>> In the present intellectual climate such a possibility is unlikely to be taken seriously, but I would repeat my earlier observation that no viable account, even a purely speculative one, seems to be available of how a system as staggeringly functionally complex and information-rich as a self-reproducing cell, controlled by DNA, RNA, or some predecessor, could have arisen by chemical evolution alone from a dead environment. <<

Nagel, Thomas (2012-08-04). Mind and Cosmos:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Kindle Locations 1572-1575). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

>> We exist in a world of values and respond to them through normative judgments that guide our actions. This, like our more general cognitive capacities, is a higher development of our nature as conscious creatures. Perhaps it includes the capacity to respond to aesthetic value as well-- construed realistically as a judgment-independent domain which our experiences and judgments reveal to us.<<

Nagel, Thomas (2012-08-04). Mind and Cosmos:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Kindle Locations 1457-1459). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Which all seems to be mighty strange talk for an atheist.

What Nagel seems to be pointing to - without naming it - seems to be what Thomas Kuhn described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition as the preconditions for a paradigm shift where problems have developed that are insoluble or impenetrable under the existing paradigm, therefore requiring that scholars "think outside the box." Interestingly, Nagel also channels Kuhn's points about the political and cultural nature of scientific fights. Nagel writes:

>> I believe there are independent empirical reasons to be skeptical about the truth of reductionism in biology. Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect.<<
Nagel, Thomas (2012-08-04). Mind and Cosmos:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Kindle Locations 76-78). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

>> In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion, I have thought it useful to speculate about possible alternatives.<<

Nagel, Thomas (2012-08-04). Mind and Cosmos:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Kindle Locations 1607-1609). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

A weakness of the book in my mind is that while Nagel mentions and sketches out some of his reasons for being skeptical of materialism - and Darwinian evolution - he doesn't make a formal argument. Presumably those who are familiar with Nagel's prior work already know what his objections are and the basis of those objections. Perhaps Nagel felt that reviewing these arguments was unnecessary or that they would have substantially expanded this slim book.

Nagel's book is also interesting in that it seems to give a boost to the "intelligent design" position, which seems to ask some fair questions that have been waived off by Darwinists. Nagel observes:

>> I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life. It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/ chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a non-negligible probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?<<

Nagel, Thomas (2012-08-04). Mind and Cosmos:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Kindle Locations 88-93). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

This "common sense" objection, coming from a top-ranked philosopher, resonated with me. As I wrote in my review of Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory In Crisis:

>> I have no problem with that idea whatsoever. But when I start to think about the details of evolution - the mechanics of how evolution occurred - I start having problems. How do mutations create new structures? How does chance give rise to the coordinated new structures required for birds to fly - i.e., the unique structure of the feather and the unique structure of the avian lung - or for whales to live in the water - i.e., morphological changes plus changes in the teats of whale mothers and the throats of whale babies required before whales can be born in the ocean? How do these mutations become a species? Is it a long and gradual process of an entire population - in which case, how does it happen in spite of the preservation of dominant traits and regression to the mean? Or is it "saltational" - big jumps by "lucky" individuals, in which case how do they manage to share their genes if the jump is too big? I would like answers to these questions, but I have noticed that the answers seem to short on details and long on tautology. The standard answer seems to go, "well, obviously, coordinated new structures can arise because that is what obviously happened." My response is usually, "I am not saying that doesn't happen, but how does it happen." The counter-response is, "It must happen because TENS is true," and I respond, "but how?"

Lather, rinse, repeat.<<

But as I pointed out in that review, you can't beat something with nothing and the theory of evolution is simply the "only game in town."

Nagel does not offer a "different game" in response to either materialism or evolution. Instead what he does is to sketch out the ideas of a project to think about the issues of mind and nature in a different way. According to Nagel, the options come down to materialism, intent or teleology. Materialism posits that everything is matter, but this runs aground on the problem of the mind. Nagel is not impressed with the idea that mental states being brain states because, well, they aren't, and he isn't impressed with the idea that the mind is "emergent" from matter because matter lacks any feature that would make a thing like the mind possible.

Nagel is equally skeptical of "intention" because that implies God and religion, and Nagel - a committed atheists - is not having any of that.

The final possibility is "teleology," which suggests that there are "laws" or something that directs the universe, matter, everything to some end, which, based on what we observe, appears to be intelligence and self-awareness. At this point, Nagel's ideas become poetic.

>> Nevertheless, the development of value and moral understanding, like the development of knowledge and reason and the development of consciousness that underlies both of those higher-order functions, forms part of what a general conception of the cosmos must explain. As I have said, the process seems to be one of the universe gradually waking up.<<

Nagel, Thomas (2012-08-04). Mind and Cosmos:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Kindle Locations 1493-1495). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

I found this movement into teleology to be very reminiscent of Etienne Gilson's From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution. At various times, Nagel seemed to moving into territory previously occupied by Aristotle and Aquinas. In fact, at times it seemed that the implications that Nagel is wrestling with were addressed by Thomistic philosophy. In my review of Gilson's book, for example, I noted:

>> Gilson ends his book by explaining why we ought to continue to think that final cause is necessary for our understanding of truth. That reason primarily is that we see it all around us, even if we don't have a mechanistic explanation for it. Gilson notes, for example, that one of the things that we see in evolutionary development is a progress toward individuation: slime mold is less individual than plants which are less individual than bees which are less individual than cows which are less individual than lions which are less individual than human beings, who have a mind and self-awareness. Is this observation wrong? No. Can it be explained mechanistically? No. Does this teleology, showing a development toward limits, exist? Yes.

Is this science? Probaby not, but it seems to be "common sense" as that term was classically understood as meaning a first order inference from undisputed facts and ideas. To paraphrase a source quoted by Gilson, scientists need to be careful in ruling out "common sense" because where the results of a scientific inquiry conflict too strongly with common sense, it may not be common sense that is wrong.

Gilson concludes by pointing out that final cause may not be scientifically useful, but it is a necessary concept for understanding reality, and it is attested to by numerous real world examples. Its truth may not be scientifically verifiable, but many things we take for granted are not scientifically verifiable. The meaning of ideas, for example, is not scientifically verifiable. We hear words, but the meanings behind the sounds and symbols that are words cannot be measured. Meanings are sense independent, and, in fact, immaterial. Does that mean that meanings don't exist?<<

Gilson's book is an extended examination of the subject of "final cause" and its relationship to the project of science. To that extent it seems well within Nagel's wheelhouse, but Nagel never cites it or Aquinas. Perhaps, Nagel stayed away from these sources because of his concern about the ideology of materialism and the possibility of giving his position a hostage to fortune by citing too religious a source.

Nagel's book is very slim. Its writing style is difficult and occasionally dense, but still accessible to an interested layperson. It is frustrating because it seems to be part of a bigger project, and so doesn't provide the answers we would like to see. In many ways, I would recommend Gilson's "From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again" as being more engaging and informative. The chief virtue of the Nagel book, in my opinion, lies in who wrote it - an atheist, well-known philosopher - and the fact that such a person can find materialism and evolution to be things he can no longer invest his faith in.