Here. (HT: the ever-helpful Dave Lull)
Category: Nagel, Thomas
A Design Argument from the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?
Substack latest.
I present an argument that many will take as supporting classical theism. But I point out that, so taken, the argument is not rationally inescapable or philosophically dispositive since it may also be construed along Nagelian lines to support an inherent immanent teleology in nature.
Topics include rationality, intentionality, both intrinsic and derivative, and the fascinating structural similarity of dispositionality to (conscious) intentionality.
A Design Argument From the Cognitive Reliability of Our Senses: A Proof of Classical Theism?
You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.
Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.
Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.
Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (and thus entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational for you to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning — 'the trail goes that-a-way' — derives from a designer. Their intentionality is derivative, not intrinsic.
Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by an unguided or 'blind' process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.
But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.
As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a twisted tree root appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is:
How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?
To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its materialistic (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes? It cannot be rational. I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:
. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, non-purposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall 1983, p. 104)
The foregoing may be summed up in the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.
2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the materialist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.
The above is an impressive argument, wouldn't you say? Of course it needs beefing up in various ways. For example, how can we be sure that there is exactly one intelligent designer and not several working in concert? If these worries can be allayed, the argument seems to establish the existence of an intelligent designer of such cognitively gifted animals as ourselves, not to mention the world in which the gifted animals are embedded. Many will be quick to identify this intelligent designer with the God of classical theism. Essential to classical theism as I am using the term is the idea that God is a personal being (tri-personal on normatively Christian accounts) who is transcendent of the physical universe which he creates and sustains in being, and is thus transcendent in the sense that he could just as well exist in his full perfection without having created anything.
But I don't believe the above argument amounts to a proof of classical theism. It does not render the latter rationally inescapable; at best, it renders it rationally acceptable. On classical theism, the intelligibility of nature has a transcendent source: it accrues to nature ab extra, which is to say: it is not immanent in nature. But why couldn't the intelligibility of nature, and with it, the cognitive reliability of the natural faculties with which we investigate nature, be inherent in the natural world? The idea is not that 'Mother Nature' is a person with conscious purposes in the way that God is a person with conscious purposes, but that nature, below the level of conscious mind, is yet mind-like in that it aims at certain outcomes, and thus has 'purposes' in an analogous sense of the term. Dispositionality provides an analogy in the small for the immanent intentionality and teleology of nature in the large.
To say that a wine glass is fragile, for example, is to say that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck or dropped onto a hard surface from a sufficient height. Several philosophers have noted the analogy with conscious intentionality. A consciously intentional state exhibits
a. directedness to an object;
b. an object that may or may nor exist;
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.
For example, right now I am gazing out my study window at Superstition Mountain. The gazing is an intentional state: it is of or about something, a definite something. It takes an accusative, and does so necessarily. The accusative or intentional object in question presumably exists. But the intentional object is what it is whether or not it exists. The phenomenological description of object and act remains the same whether or not the object exists. Moreover, the object as presented in the act of gazing is incomplete: there are properties such that the intentional object neither has them nor their complements. Thus, to a quick glance, what is given in the intentional experience is 'a purplish mountain.' Just that. Now anything purple or purplish is colored, and anything colored is extended; but being colored and being extended are not properties of the intentional object as such. No doubt they are properties of the mountain itself in reality; but they are not properties of the precise intentional object of my gazing, which has all and only the properties it is seen to have. Furthermore, in reality, yonder mountain is either such that someone is climbing on it or not; but the intentional object of my momentary gazing is indeterminate with respect to the property of being climbed on by someone.
The same or similar points can be made about dispositions. If a piece of glass is fragile, then it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. There cannot be a disposition that is not a disposition to do something, to shatter, or explode, or melt.
Second, the reality of a disposition is independent of its manifestation: a fragile piece of glass is actually fragile whether or not it ever breaks. From the fact that x is disposed to F, one cannot infer that x ever Fs. This parallels a feature of intentionality: from the fact that x is thinking about Fs one cannot infer that there exist Fs that x is thinking about. (If I am thinking about unicorns it does not follow that there exist unicorns I am thinking about; if I want a sloop it doesn't follow that there is a sloop I want; if Ernest is hunting lions it doesn't follow that there are any lions he is hunting.)
Third, although a manifested disposition is a fully determinate state of affairs, this complete determinateness is not present in the disposition qua disposition. The disposition to shatter if suitably struck is not the disposition to shatter into ten pieces if suitably struck, although it is of course the disposition to shatter into some number or other of pieces, the exact number being left indeterminate.
Conclusion and Metaphilosophical Upshot
And so it might be like this: nature in itself is animated by an intrinsic immanent teleology or intentionality below the level of conscious mind, an intrinsic (as opposed to derivative) purposiveness which is present in nature all along, but which becomes conscious only in us. This intrinsic and ubiquitous pre-conscious teleology or purposiveness suffices to ground the cognitive reliability of our faculties, and in such a way as to make it rational for us to trust their deliverances. For on this scheme, there is nothing fluky or accidental about mind. Mind is king and it is there all along. And this without any assistance ab extra from God, and of course without any constructive 'worldmaking' nonsense of the Goodmanian sort. (Allusion to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). We also avoid the eliminativist Unsinn of Daniel Dennett the scientistic sophist.
I am limning the metaphysical scheme presented by Thomas Nagel in his Mind and Cosmos, an overview of which you will find at my Substack site.
Nagel's panpsychist immanentism no doubt has it own flaws, as any decent aporetician ought to suspect. But Nagel's proposal does challenge any quick acquiescence in the design argument for God sketched above.
And so I come around once again to my oft-made meta-philosophical claim that in these metaphysical and theological precincts (and not just here) there are no 'knock-down' arguments, no arguments that are rationally compelling (rationally coercive, rationally inescapable, philosophically dispositive, pick your favorite phrase).
Let the dogmatists howl.
The dogs bark, the caravan passes: it ürür, kervan yürür.
Along the Silk Road, headed East.
Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos
An overview. Substack latest.
Nagel on Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion
Substack latest.
Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
Substack latest.
Must God Become Man to Know the Human Lot?
Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron:
In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.”
Why is the full scope and content of the human experience, including the most extreme pain and death itself, not known by God, who is omniscient, without the Incarnation? Why should the flesh, enmeshed in and limited by human sensory perception, be a necessary, supplementary mode by which such experience is conveyed to and hence shared by the Deity?
The question is why an omniscient God would have to enter the material world to know the full scope and content of human experience. If God is omniscient, then he knows everything. And if he knows everything, then he knows what it is like to be a man undergoing torture and bodily death. Why then must God compromise his purely spiritual status by Incarnation? Why can't God know what it is like to be a man without becoming a man?
To answer directly, one could know everything it is possible to know about a sentient organism without knowing what it is like to be that organism. And so God, who knows everything it is possible to know about every type of sentient organism, and is therefore objectively omniscient with respect to every type of organism, is nonetheless subjectively nescient in that he does not and cannot know what it is like to be an organism of any type. This is because he is not an organism of any type; he is a pure spirit.
Consider an ethologist who studies bats. Suppose he comes to know every objective fact about bats including exactly how they locate and perceive objects in their environment using echolocation, or 'bat sonar.' Knowing all these objective facts, our scientist would still not know what it is like to be a bat. He would not know the subjective experiences that bats have when they detect, pursue, etc. objects in their environment. He could know everything about the objective correlates in the bat's brain of the bat's experience, but he would not be able to know the subjective character of those experiences. To know bat qualia, our scientist would have to be a bat.
Same with God: he would have to be a man to know what it is like to be a man, that is, to know 'from the inside' the subjective character of human experience, its highs, lows, and doldrums.
These ruminations give rise to a number of further questions. But it is Saturday night, time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and rustle up some grub.
Aficionados will know that I am borrowing from Thomas Nagel, What is like to be a bat? Here is a short video that treats of some of his ideas.
From the Archives: Eight Years Ago Today
David Gordon Reviews Thomas Nagel's New Book and Criticizes Brian Leiter's Puerile Fulminations
David Gordon reviews Thomas Nagel's Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–2008. The following is a particularly interesting portion of the review in which Gordon comments on a certain status-obsessed careerist's puerile fulminations against a real philosopher:
Conscious Experience: A Hard Nut to Crack
This is an addendum to Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem. In that entry I set forth a problem in the philosophy of mind, pouring it into the mold of an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
This is one hard nut to crack. So hard that many, following David Chalmers, call it, or something very much like it, the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind. It is so hard that it drives some into the loony bin. I am thinking of Daniel Dennett and those who have the chutzpah to deny (1). But eliminativism about conscious experience is not worth discussing outside of the aforementioned bin.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Those of a scientistic stripe accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
What I didn't do in my original post was to state why a Nagel-type answer is better than a scientistic one.
Why not just reject (2)? One way to reject it is by holding that some physical processes are essentially subjective. Consider any felt sensation precisely as felt, a twinge of pain, say, or a rush of euphoria. Why couldn't that felt sensation be identical to a physical process transpiring in one's brain?
Here is an argument contra. Not every brain event is identical to a conscious experience. There is a lot going on in the brain that does not manifest itself at the level of consciousness. What then distinguishes those brain events that are conscious experiences from those that are not? There will have to be a difference in properties. But if the only properties are physical properties, taking 'physical' in a broad sense to include the properties mentioned in physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, and so on, then there will be no way to distinguish between conscious and non-conscious brain events. Since there is that distinction, conscious experiences cannot be identical to brain events. (Don't forget: eliminativism has been eliminated.)
More simply, perhaps, the claim that a particular conscious experience is numerically identical to a brain event violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Necessarily, if x, y are identical (one and the same), then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. Equivalently, if x = y, then x, y share all properties. (After all, if two putatively distinct items are in reality one item, then it is trivially the case that 'they' share all properties.) But conscious experiences and physical states do not share all properties. It could be true of a pain that it is bearable, excruciating, throbbing, non-throbbing, etc. But these phenomenal predicates cannot be true of a physical state such as brain state. Why not? Because physical states have only physical properties, and no phenomenal properties.
"But if the pain and the brain state are identical, then they must share all properties!" True, but which properties are those? The physicalist/materialist/naturalist can admit only physical properties. His aim is to reduce the mental (or at least the qualitatively mental) to the physical, but without eliminating the mental. That I claim is impossible. For again, conscious experiences are essentially subjective, as Nagel says, but there is nothing essentially subjective about physical states as physics and the related natural sciences conceive them. The materialist reduction doesn't work. Sensory qualia have not been show to be material in nature.
Going Mysterian
Someone who thinks that qualia just have to be material in nature might at this point go mysterian along the lines of Colin McGinn. The mysterian grants that we cannot understand how that twinge of pain or that sense of euphoria could be just a complex state of the brain, a pattern of neuron firings. But he insists that it is nevertheless the case. It is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to understand how it could be the case. After all, if x is actual, then it is possible even if we cannot understand how it is possible. It is and will remain a sort of secular mystery.
In other words, the unintelligibility of the reduction of consciousness to matter is not taken as an argument against this reduction, but as an argument against our ability to grasp certain fundamental truths. Thus (2) and (3) above are both true and hence logically consistent; it is just that insight into this consistency is beyond our ken. What is unintelligible to us is intelligible in itself. In reality, my felt pain is identical to something going on intracranially; it is just that insight into how this is possible is impossible for us given how were are constructed.
There are problems with this mysterian way out that I may discuss in a separate post.
Two Ways of Referring to the Same Thing?
Another option for the materialist is to invoke the familiar idea that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation. Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.
Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)
It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.
Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.
The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.
Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)
In vino veritas.
I conclude that if our aporetic triad has a solution, the solution is by rejecting (3).
Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem
Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering:
The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it is like for its subject, from the inside—that purely physical processes do not share. Physical concepts describe the world as it is in itself, and not for any conscious subject. That includes dark energy, the strong force, and the development of an organism from the egg, to cite Black’s examples. But if subjective experience is not an illusion, the real world includes more than can be described in this way.
I agree with Black that “we need to determine what ‘thing,’ what activity of neurons beyond activating other neurons, was amplified to the point that consciousness arose.” But I believe this will require that we attribute to neurons, and perhaps to still more basic physical things and processes, some properties that in the right combination are capable of constituting subjects of experience like ourselves, to whom sunsets and chocolate and violins look and taste and sound as they do. These, if they are ever discovered, will not be physical properties, because physical properties, however sophisticated and complex, characterize only the order of the world extended in space and time, not how things appear from any particular point of view.
The problem might be condensed into an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Take a little time to savor this problem. Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
Which proposition should we reject? Dennett, I take it, would reject (1). But that's a lunatic solution as Professor Black seems to appreciate, though he puts the point more politely. When I call Dennett a sophist, as I have on several occasions, I am not abusing him; I am underscoring what is obvious, namely, that the smell of cooked onions, for example, is a genuine datum of experience, and that such phenomenological data trump scientistic theories.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Black, and others of the scientistic stripe, accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
I appreciate the appeal of the naturalistic-scientistic worldview and I don't dismiss it in the way I dismiss eliminativism about the mental:
Look, there is just one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it including all your precious thoughts, moods, and sensations. If you are serious about explaining consciousness, then you have to explain it the way you explain everything else: in terms of our best natural science. With the progress of science over the centuries, more and more of what hitherto was thought inexplicable scientifically has been explained. The trend is clear: science is increasingly de-mystifying the world, and it is a good induction that one day it will have wholly de-mystified it and will have cut off every obscurantist escape route into the Cloud Cuckoo Land of religion/superstition.
It is essential to see, however, that this worldview is precisely that, a worldview, and therefore just another philosophy. This is what makes it scientistic as opposed to scientific. Scientism is not science, but philosophy. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, where naturalism is not science but ontology. No natural science can prove that reality is exhausted by the physical, and no natural science can prove that all and only the scientifically knowable is knowable.
But it is not irrational to be a naturalist and a scientisticist — an ugly word for an ugly thing — in the way that it is irrational to be an eliminativist. But is also not irrational to reject naturalism and scientism.
And so the strife of systems will continue. People like me will continue to insist that qualia, intentionality, conscience, normativity, reason, truth and other things cannot be explained naturalistically. Those on the other side will keep trying. Let them continue, with vigor. The more they fail, the better we look.
Do those on our side have a hidden religious agenda? Some do. But Nagel doesn't. He is just convinced that the naturalist project doesn't work. Nagel rejects theism, and I believe he says somewhere that he very much does not want it to be the case that religion is true.
Nagel, then, has no religious agenda. But this did not stop numerous prominent, but viciously leftist, academics from attacking him after he published Mind and Cosmos. See the following articles of mine:
Should Nagel's Book be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?
Nagel on Dennett: Is Consciousness an Illusion?
A NYRB review. (HT: the enormously helpful Dave Lull)
To put it bluntly and polemically: Thomas Nagel is the real thing as philosophers go; Daniel Dennett is a sophist.
My Nagel category; my Dennett category.
Killer Quote:
I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”
That's right. When a line of reasoning issues in an absurdity such as the absurdity that consciousness and its deliverances are illusions, then what you have is a reductio ad absurdum of one or more of the premises with which the reasoning began. Dennett assumes physicalism and that everything can be explained in physical terms. This leads to absurdity. But Dennett, blinded by his own brilliance — don't forget, he counts himself one of the 'brights' — bites the bullet. He'd rather break his teeth than examine his assumptions.
Another thing struck me. Dennett makes much of Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. 'Image' is not quite the right word. An image is someone's image. But whose image is the scientific image? Who is its subject? It is arguably our image no less than the manifest image. Nagel quotes Dennett as saying of the manifest image: "It’s the world according to us." But the same, or something very similar, is true of the scientific image: it's the world in itself according to us. Talk of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, and strings is our talk just as much as talk of colors and plants and animals and haircuts and home runs.
The world of physics is the world as it is in itself according to us. Arguably, the 'according to us' gets the upper hand over the 'in itself' relativizing what comes within the former's scope much like Kant's transcendental prefix, Ich denke. Das 'ich denke' muss alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten koennen . . . . "The ''I think' must be able to accompany all my representations." (KdrV, B 131-2)
Arguably, the world of physics is a mind-involving construct arrived at by excluding the mental and abstracting away from the first-person point of view and the life world it reveals. I am alluding to an idealist approach to the problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view. It has its own problems. But why is it inferior to a view like Dennett's which eliminates as illusory obvious data that are plainly not illusory?
Time was when absolute idealism was the default position in philosophy. Think back to the days of Bradley and Bosanquet. But reaction set in, times have changed, and the Zeitgeist is now against the privileging of Mind and for the apotheosis of Matter. (But again, matter as construed by us. Arguably, the scientific realist reifies theoretical constructs that we create and employ to make sense of experience.) Because idealism is out of vogue, the best and brightest are not drawn to its defense, and the brilliant few it attracts are too few to make much headway against the prevailing winds.
Now I'll tell you what I really think. The problem of integrating the first- and third-person points of view is genuine and perhaps the deepest of all philosophical problems. But it is insoluble by us. If it does have a solution, however, it certainly won't be anything like Dennett's.
Although Dennett's positive theory is worthless, his excesses are extremely useful in helping us see just how deep and many-sided and intractable the problem is.
Keith Burgess-Jackson on Thomas Nagel
This is worth reproducing; I came to essentially the same conclusion (emphasis added):
The viciousness with which this book [Mind and Cosmos] was received is, quite frankly, astonishing. I can understand why scientists don't like it; they're wary of philosophers trespassing on their terrain. But philosophers? What is philosophy except (1) the careful analysis of alternatives (i.e., logical possibilities), (2) the questioning of dogma, and (3) the patient distinguishing between what is known and what is not known (or known not to be) in a given area of human inquiry? Nagel's book is smack dab in the Socratic tradition. Socrates himself would admire it. That Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who has made important contributions to many branches of the discipline, is vilified by his fellow philosophers (I use the term loosely for what are little more than academic thugs) shows how thoroughly politicized philosophy has become. I find it difficult to read any philosophy after, say, 1980, when political correctness, scientism, and dogmatic atheism took hold in academia. Philosophy has become a handmaiden to political progressivism, science, and atheism. Nagel's "mistake" is to think that philosophy is an autonomous discipline. I fully expect that, 100 years from now, philosophers will look back on this era as the era of hacks, charlatans, and thugs. Philosophy is too important to be given over to such creeps.
One such creepy thug is this corpulent apparatchik of political correctness:
For more on this theme, see my Should Nagel's Book be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?
My Nagel posts are collected here.
Anderson on Nagel
Good Reads
Roger Kimball, Racism, Inc.
Victor Davis Hanson, The Decline of College; The Late, Great Middle Class
Leon Wieseltier, Crimes Against Humanities
Edward Feser, Man is Wolff to Man. I was going to write this post, but Ed beat me to it. Ed beats down the superannuated Wolff for boarding the bandwagon of benighted bashers of Nagel. These lefties just can't stand Nagel even though he is a naturalist, an atheist, and a liberal. Why? Because he is not an extremist like they are. Because he could conceivably be interpreted by someone as giving aid and comfort to the enemy: the theists. For not toeing the party line. For thinking for himself. For being the Real Thing and not a leftist ideologue. It is sad to see professional philosophy ideologized like this.
Kirsten Powers, A Global Slaughter of Christians. The 'religion of peace' is at it again. But the PC-whipped churches stay silent.
By the way, I admire the hell out of Kirsten Powers, even though she's a Dem (why Lord, why?): she has beauty, brains, and (the female equivalent of) balls. And she puts up goodnaturedly with the sometimes obnoxious Bill O'Reilly. But I admire the hell out of him as well. That leftists despise a moderate such as him shows what contemptible extremists they are.
Thomas Nagel on the Central Argument of His Mind and Cosmos
Here. Excerpt:
This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.
There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.
Nagel, of course, rejects each of (a)-(d).
My overview of Nagel's book is here. More detailed posts on Nagel are in the aptly denominated Nagel category.
The comments on Nagel's piece are mostly garbage. There is something offensive about allowing any birdbrain to leave his droppings on an essay by one of our best philosophers.
The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.