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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
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Thomas Nagel, in Mind and Cosmos, reached out to some surprising collaborators, and makes some surprising confessions, in this interesting but underpowered exploration. Nagel starts with a set of presuppositions that he spells out, but does not adequately justify. Due to his providing far too weak a preamble to defend his starting premises, nobody who is not already aware of the concerns he assumes, will bother to engage in the suspension of disbelief needed to explore these questions. As a result, the book is not effective in getting people to consider the questions he is asking.Nagle assumes that the failure of physicalist reductionism about consciousness is a given, and that the challenges that abiogenesis has encountered are reasonably well known. He then engaged Alvin Plantinga and his anti-materialist, anti-Darwinian thinking – and took what is probably the best piece of thinking that Plantinga has offered. This is the observation that a Darwinian sourced “reasoning†skill is not any more reliable or trustworthy than any of our other Darwinian sourced mental toolkit – so our reasoning, from a survival perspective, is no more valid than our intuitions, moral sense, and consciousness. Therefore one cannot from a Darwinian perspective reference reason or science to dismiss any of the others. Nagel then adds reasoning and reasoning and morality (both as a semi-platonist “realityâ€) to the suite of surprising things that a worldview must explain the existence of.This gives him four challenging things: life, consciousness, reasoning, and morality, that he considers a worldview has to explain. Given that he assumes that abiogenesis research has stagnated, and consciousness is not reducible, he cannot reference reductive consciousness to explain reasoning or morality, and the book serves as an exploration of the alternatives.After dismissing reduction, Nagel then dismisses theistic phenomena as well. Nagel’s primary alternative is “teleology†– that there is some feature of the universe that makes it predisposed to create reasoning and morality, and that life and consciousness are just way stations to get to these further phenomenon. Nagel tries to address this “teleology†concept generically, and considers a variety of structural or logic challenges to the existence of such a feature.This discussion had a variety of weaknesses. “Teleology†assumes a purpose, I.E. intention, and if this is supposed to be an alternative to theist metaphysics, then a “purpose†driven universe does not strike me as a sufficiently neutral term. There is an alternative to telelogy, that he does not discuss, and does nto explain why. A number of other thinkers, including Stuart Kauffman, Christian DeDuve, and Paul Davies, have proposed self-organizational principles that could fall under the characteristics he calls “teleologyâ€, but without the “intention†implication. Self organization, plus a strong (causally open/independent) emergence principle is far more specific than the generic “teleologyâ€, and is specific enough to evaluate its plausibilityagainst the rest of the universe. These two principles could plausibly increase the odds of life emerging, and make abiogenesis less of a mystery. It is less clear why they would lead living things to be conscious, however – functionalism and AI advances show that we could have been meat machines. And getting from consciousness to reasoning and morality – it is not clear that these two principles would at all. So – perhaps that is why he ignored this prior emergence thinking, as he did not consider it sufficiently powerful an assumption set to deal with his four mysteries.Sticking with his teleology then, despite the theistic implication – there is a major set of questions Nagel fails to ask: what would this assumption predict about the universe, and does the universe match this prediction?• IF the universe were trying to create reasoning or morality,• AND these are only achievable with advanced reasoning minds –• THEN the universe would be configured to produce lots of minds.IF the universe were optimized to produce minds, AND minds were emergent from complex matter (Nagel is assuming emergent property dualism relative to consciousness here), THEN the universe would be configured to consist of basically all complex matter. This is manifestly not the case – only some 7% is matter, and that couldn't form complexity until billions of years into the age of the universe after supernova have formed the higher elements then spread them out. Our universe can support life in something like 0.001% of its mass (roughtly the mass fraction in planets and asteroids), and only starting about 5 billion years after its formation. If teleology was at work in our universe, it is a pretty weak teleology. Nagel admits his purely conceptual discussion of teleology identifies enough problems already that he has a weak case for this idea, and when one adds in simple test cases, the entire concept seems absurd.These very apparent flaws with teleologic emergence highlight the primary flaws in this book. The credibility of this implausible concept of teleological emergence depends on it being less obviously wrong than either reductionist or theistic worldviews, but Nagel provides his readers no resources to make this comparison.The most controversial passages in the book are two paragraphs in the introduction in which Nagel defends the Intelligent Design movement. This section is once more underpowered. Nagel admits himself to be not competent to judge the outcome of ID's dispute with Darwinian thinking, but then contradictorily renders a judgment that ID did not lose decisively, credits them for asking good questions, then moves on, leaving readers hanging. Another few paragraphs outlining the something like my own thinking in the following would have done wonders: "In **my** judgment ID lost decisively as a science theory, as ID avoided ever making any predictions, and predictions are a prerequisite for science. What ID DID do was identify test cases for Darwinian thinking. Evolution is an incremental process, and it cannot make steps larger than some TBD size. WHAT IS THAT SIZE, and HOW DO WE MEASURE/TEST FOR IT??? it usually takes an opposing theory to force advocates to answer such test questions, and ID provides such a challenge. ID advocates proposed their own answers: Irreducible Complexity to define what is outside the step size, and Specified Complexity to do the measuring. These may be imperfect terms, and they have been criticized, but if they are flawed it is incumbent on evolutionists to specify what testable alternatives should look like. Intrinsic to the ID thinking is that Abiogenesis will fall outside the range of what evolutionary processes can achieve – and it really is up to abiogenesis advocates to answer why it should be considered a plausible process, and the terms in which such a claim should be made." If Nagel had written some similar supplement, he would have avoided a lot of the flack that he recieved.Nagel reveals much of his personal views here. He notes that he is an atheist, who considers theism to be implausible to the extreme. He also admits to wishing that reductive physicalism was how the universe works. But he considers the rationale against reductive physicalism to be extremely convincing. And given the problems he sees in theism, he felt compelled to try to find some emergentist alternative worldview. This is admirable, however this admirable effort suffers from both a) he does not spell out this convincing rationale to encourage other physicalist-leaning thinkers to follow his lead in pursuing these ideas, and b) the ideas he came up with are so weak.
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.
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