I've located a page of notes I found in my Word files concerning the subject of endophysics, which I'll copy here:
Read this:
The Qualia of "Now": Key to a Fundamental Equation of Consciousness? The Qualia of “Now”: Key to a Fundamental Equation of Consciousness? John Sanfey, TSC. Skovde {{ cf. Husserl’s Phen of internal time consciousness}}
ENDOPHYSICS
Apt: “Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth" (x-xi). Robert Nozick,
State, Anarchy, and Utopia
Get this: Neosentience: The Benevolence Engine [Paperback]
Bill Seaman (Author), Otto E. Rossler (Author) e=book:
Neosentience
Amazon:
Neosentience: The Benevolence Engine: Bill Seaman, Otto E. Rossler: 9781841504049: Amazon.com: Books
ALSO SEE:
http://www.emcsr-conference.org/2012/paper/view/140
?? Neosentience and The Abstraction of Abstraction
William (Bill) Curtis Seaman and Otto Rossler
Abstract: This paper will use a survey methodology to point at notions surrounding “the reflexive” and “reciprocity” drawn from the history of Cybernetics as they fall in relation to current “Neosentient” research. Seaman and O. E. Rössler have been involved in a decade long discussion exploring the future of artificial intelligence and its relation to robotics. Seaman coined the term Neosentience arising out of an ongoing “conversation” with Rössler which is articulated in their book – Neosentience | The Benevolence Engine (Seaman and Rössler, 2011). The book is a non-linear compendium of observations, many of which are drawn from the history of Cybernetics and in particular explore “Reciprocity and Reflexivity in Cybernetic Thinking.”
ATMANSPACHER http://www.blutner.de/tandem/slides/Atmanspacher_bloomington.pdf
Georg Franck, Physical Time and Intrinsic Temporality http://www.iemar.tuwien.ac.at/publications/GF_1994a.pdf
Rossler, Endophysics: The World As an Interface [Hardcover]
Otto E. Rossler
Endophysics
Endophysics: The World as an Interface: Otto E Rossler: 9789810227524: Amazon.com: Books
Graham Harmon, The Quadruple Object: “the cryptic, withdrawn reality of things”, pg. 53
Pg. 71, the “somewhat tedious mind-body problem”. Goes on to observe that there had also been a body-body problem in Islam. Compare Evan Thompson's paper, “The Body-body problem”. See the rest of that par.
neosentience; bisociation; neosentient design; artificial Intelligence; robotics; multi-perspective approach; 2nd order Cybernetics; insight engine
AND:
[Yasmin_an] Neosentience: The Benevolence Engine>>> a new book by Bill Seaman and Otto Rössler
Neo-sentience; the benevolence machine:
Neosentience
Also:
Intellect Ltd.
GET FROM FSU LIBRARY, OR IF POSSIBLE A XEROX COPY (22 pp., classed as a book):
Inside versus outside : endo- and exo-concepts of observation and knowledge in physics, philosophy and cognitive science
Harald Atmanspacher
Berlin [u.a.] : Springer, 1994.
Series: Springer series in synergetics, 62
See Jahn and other papers in R. Buccheri et al. (eds.); Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective; 81{102\...
Conf. call: “
Aim:
The workshop will focus on the possible role of the endo-physical paradigm in the future development of physics and in our understanding of Nature as a whole. The main topics to be discussed are the nature of time, quantum theory and the concept of subjectivity,
where the radical shift from the exo- to endo-principles is most likely to occur first. More particular topics comprise the puzzling discrepancy between the physical and psychological aspects of time, psychopathology of time, quantum entanglement, separability and non-locality, the status of first-person perspective and the prospect of naturalization of subjectivity, to mention a few. An in-depth interdisciplinary dialogue along these strongly interconnected issues is likely to have a profound impact on the development of natural science and philosophy.
Scientific Organizing Committee:
- Rosolino Buccheri (Co-Organizer), Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica - Sezione di Palermo, CNR, Palermo, Italy ([email protected], http://www.pa.iasf.cnr.it/~buccheri)
- Avshalom Elitzur (Co-Organizer), Unit of Interdisciplinary Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel ([email protected], http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~elitzua)
- Metod Saniga (Principal Organizer), Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovak Republic ([email protected], http//www.astro.sk/~msaniga/)
ABSTRACTS OF THE PAPERS:
Endophysics, Time, Quantum
SEE also in that vol: : Experience of Time Passage:. Phenomenology, Psychophysics, and Biophysical Modelling
Wackermann, Jiří
ENDOPHYSICS, TIME, QUANTUM AND THE SUBJECTIVE. Proceedings of the ZiF Interdisciplinary Research Workshop. Held 17-22 January 2005 in Bielefeld, Germany. Edited by Rosolino Buccheri (Istituto per le Tecnologie Didattiche, CNR, Palermo, Italy), Avshalom C Elitzur (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel) & Metod Saniga (Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Tatranská Lomnica, Slovak Republic). Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2005. ISBN #9789812701596, pp. 189-208
The experience of time's passing appears, from the 1st person perspective, to be a primordial subjective experience, seemingly inaccessible to the 3rd person accounts of time perception (psychophysics, cognitive psychology). In our analysis of the `dual klepsydra' model of reproduction of temporal durations, time passage occurs as a cognitive construct, based upon more elementary (`proto-cognitive') function of the psychophysical organism. This conclusion contradicts the common concepts of `subjective' or `psychological' time as readings of an `internal clock'. Our study shows how phenomenological, experimental and modelling approaches can be fruitfully combined.
SUMMARY OF BOOK AT GOOGLE BOOKS (NO SEARCHABLE TEXT PROVIDED AT GOOGLE BOOKS): “Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective is the first systematic cross- and trans-disciplinary appraisal of the endophysical paradigm and its possible role in our understanding of Nature. Focusing on three of the most pressing issues of contemporary science, the interpretation of quantum theory, the nature of time, and the problem of consciousness, it provides the reader with some forefront research, concepts and ideas in these areas, such as incessant Big Bang, geometrizing of "mental space-times," and a contextual view of quantum mechanics and/or a view of the Universe as a self-evolving quantum automaton.”
{{{
See also the paper on semiotics in that volume}}}
Other available books on endophysics:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=stripbooks&field-keywords=endophysics
ALSO SEE: Filters and Reflections: Perspectives on Reality
edited by Zachary Jones, Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn
Filters and Reflections
Primas,
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/950/1/Exo-theories.pdf
Jahn,
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/2005-endophysical-models-empirical-data.pdf
OTTO ROSSLER: Featured Author: Otto E. Rössler
Otto E. Rössler (b. in Berlin, Germany, May 20, 1940) became an amateur radio operator (DL 9KF) at the age of 17. He finished his medical studies with an immunological dissertation in Tubingen in 1966. Dr. Rössler then began as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Bavaria. In 1969, he won a visiting appointment at the Center for Theoretical Biology at SUNY-Buffalo. In 1970-73, he got a habilitation from the DFG. In 1976, he became a tenured University Docent. In 1979, he became Professor for Theoretical Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen. In 1994, he became Professor of Chemistry by decree.
In 1975, Art Winfree initiated him into chaos. One year later he published his paper on the "simplest" chaotic attractor (as Ed Lorenz later put it). Three years after, hyperchaos followed, which was equally simple. He is a member of the Santa Fe Institute and a fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics. In 2003, he received the Chaos Award of the University of Liège and in 2003 the René Descartes Award. In 1999 he obtained a honorary doctorate from the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics.
Throughout his career Dr. Rössler has authored around 500 scientific papers in fields as wide-ranging as Biogenesis, deductive biology, origin of language, differentiable automata, bacterial brain, brain equations, chaotic attractors, dripping faucet, heart chaos (with Reimara Rössler), hyperchaos, nowhere-differentiable attractors (with Jack Hudson and Ichiro Tsuda), flare attractors, endophysics, micro relativity, Platonic computers, micro constructivism, recursive evolution, limitology, interface theory, artificial universes, the hypertext encyclopedia, Lampsacus hometown of all persons, blind-sight experiments in physics, world-change technology. He wrote four books: Encounter with Chaos (1992), Endophysics: The world As an Interface (1992), Jonas World - The Thinking of Child (1994, in German), and The Flaming Sword (1996 in German), as well as the CD Descartes' Traum (in German). For more information, visit
[ATOMOSYD] RÖSSLER Otto
Scholarpedia articles:
Rossler attractor. Scholarpedia, 1(10):1721. (2006) Hyperchaos. Scholarpedia, 2(8):1936. (2007)
(Author profile by Jian Liu)
List of previous featured authors
SORT THESE OUT
R. Buccheri et al. (eds.); Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective; 489–498
QUANTUM MEASUREMENT ACT AS A SPEECH-ACT,
JEAN SCHNEIDER
“…Since the beginning of time (in about 1926) it has been argued that QM is about experience, knowledge, or information [16, 17, 18, 19], rather than about a free-standing reality capable of being described without reference to observers, their information, their interventions into “the course of Nature” [20], or their arbitrary decisions as to where to make the “shifty split” between “system” and “apparatus” [21]. Why? Because it is such
an easy way to establish the consistent coexistence of extrinsic and intrinsic variables. If the properties of the quantum world are extrinsic (that is, if they “dangle” from, or supervene on, something), and if the quantum world is coextensive with the physical world, then from what can they “dangle”? The obvious answer: from us, from what we perceive, or from what we know.
For this easy way out we pay a high price. By safeguarding against empirical refutation conceptions of space and time that are consistent with the phenomenal world but inconsistent with the physical world, we make sure that we won’t discover the spatiotemporal features of the quantum world. And by rooting the possible value-indicating events,
to which QM assigns probabilities, in the world of sensory experience, we make sure that we can’t conceive of the quantum world as a strongly objective, free-standing reality that owes nothing to observers, information, or our interventions into the course of Nature.
7 PHYSICAL SPACE VS PHENOMENAL SPACE—II
Macroscopic positions are so abundantly and so sharply indicated that they are only counterfactually fuzzy. Their fuzziness never evinces itself, through uncaused transitions or in any other manner. It exists solely in relation to an imaginary spatial background that is more differentiated than the physical world. The space over which the position of a macroscopic object is “smeared out” is never probed. This space is undifferentiated; it contains no smaller regions. We may imagine smaller regions, but they have no counterparts in the physical world. The distinctions we make between them are distinctions that nature does not make.
It follows that the quantum world is only finitely differentiated spacewise, and that it ought to [be] regarded as constructed from the top down, by a finite process of differentiation, rather than from the bottom up, on a self-existent and maximally differentiated spatial expanse. And much the same applies to the world’s temporal aspect. Time is not an independent observable; it has to be read off of deterministically evolving positions—the positions of macroscopic clocks. If these bear a residual fuzziness, so do all indicated times. The upshot: The quantum world is maximally differentiated neither spacewise nor timewise, and it is constructed from the top down with respect to both space and time.
To advance further, we must be clear about what it means when a particle is said to be “pointlike.” This is an expression of the fact that the particle lacks internal structure. Nothing in the formalism of QM refers to the shape of an object that lacks internal structure, and the empirical data cannot possibly do so. All that experiments can reveal in this regard is the absence of evidence of internal structure. The idea that a so-called
“point particle” is an object that not only lacks internal relations but also has the shape of a point, is thus unwarranted both theoretically and experimentally. It is, besides, seriously misleading, inasmuch as the image of a pointlike object suggests the existence of an infinitesimal neighborhood in an intrinsically and maximally differentiated spatial
expanse. To bring our intuitions in line with the spatiotemporal aspects of the quantum world, we need to conceive of all so-called “point particles” as formless objects. What lacks internal relations also lacks a shape.
It follows that the shapes of material objects resolve themselves into sets of (more or less fuzzy) spatial relations between formless objects, and that space itself is the totality of such relations—relative positions and relative orientations. It further follows that the corresponding relata do not exist in space. Space contains, in the proper, set-theoretic sense of “containment,” the forms of all things that have forms—for forms are sets of spatial relations—but it does not contain material objects over and above their forms; a fortiori it does not contain the formless constituents of matter. Instead, space exists between them; it is spanned by their relations.
The quantum world with its fuzzy spatial relations does not “fit” into the self-existent and maximally differentiated expanse of classical space; the possibility of thinking of the relata as points and embedding them in a single manifold exists only if all spatial relations are definite (“sharp”). A clear distinction should therefore be made between the existing (more or less fuzzy) spatial relations that constitute physical space, and the purely
imaginary space that comes with each material object O and contains the unpossessed exact positions relative to O. These imaginary spaces are delocalized relative to each other: The unpossessed exact positions relative to O are fuzzy relative to any material object other than O.
The difference between the respective ways in which spatial distinctions are realized in the physical and phenomenal worlds could hardly be greater. In the physical world spatial distinctions are realized by means of (more or less fuzzy) spatial relations between formless objects. In the phenomenal world they are realized by means of boundaries. Visual representations arise by way of an analysis of the visual field that capitalizes on contrast information. Data arriving at the visual cortex from homogeneously colored and evenly lit regions of the visual field do not make it into conscious awareness. Such regions are filled in on the basis of contrast information across their boundaries [14]. (This explains, among many other things, why the blind spot goes unperceived whenever it falls in such a region.) The way in which the brain processes visual information thus guarantees that the result—the phenomenal world—is a world of objects whose shapes are bounding surfaces. The parts of any phenomenal object accordingly are defined by the parts of the space it “occupies,” and these are defined by delimiting and separating surfaces. This too implies that the parts of space pre-exist somehow—otherwise they couldn’t define the parts of a phenomenal object,—and this is another reason why we
tend to conceive of space (inconsistently with the quantum world) as a pre-existent and intrinsically differentiated expanse.
Ulrich Mohrhoff, “Beyond the cookie cutter paradigm,” in Consciousness and its Transformation:
Papers presented at the Second International Conference on Integral Psychology, edited by M. Cornelissen (Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education,Pondicherry, 2001), pp. 333–345.
[14] U. Mohrhoff, “Quantum mechanics and the cookie cutter paradigm,” arXiv:quantph/0009001.
E.P. Wigner, “Remarks on the mind–body question,” in
The Scientist Speculates,
edited by I.J. Good (Heinemann, London, 1961), pp. 284–302.
W. Heisenberg, “The representation of nature in contemporary physics,” Daedalus 87, 95–108 (1958).
[20] C.A. Fuchs and A. Peres, “Quantum theory needs no ‘interpretation’,” Phys. Today 53 (3), 70–71 (2000).
[21] J.S. Bell, “Against ‘measurement’,” in 62 Years of Uncertainty, edited by A.I. Miller (Plenum, New York, 1990), 17–31.
~~~~~~~~
In R. Buccheri et al. (eds.); Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective; 489–498
QUANTUM MEASUREMENT ACT AS A SPEECH-ACT
JEAN SCHNEIDER
http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0504199.pdf
3.2 Tentative quantum modelization of the Mind-Body relation
To address this question, Mind and Body have first to be defined and
characterized in the framework of the concepts presented here (Schneider
1997).
“The” mind, or the subject, as things are bad primitive concepts. They
have to be replaced by a-subjective symbols, i.e. symbols by their own,
source-less. In the present view, the “subjective” is then a particular object: an object constructed out of ethical symbolic forms d. The physical body is not the source of sensations. As a physiological
object, it is an abstraction constructed by a bio-physical theoretization out
of primitive and source-less sensations.
In other words, the primitive concepts are no more Mind and Body,
but sensations and symbols out of which Mind and Body are constructed
abstract objects. In particular, the body is an abstract synthesis of physiological attributes resulting from symbolization. In quantum theory, symbolic attributes (i.e. values of observables) emerge randomly and are cause-less. By extending the notion of symbol as cThis process leads to the notion of “afterwardness”, a non linear notion of time, describedby J. Lacan.in his work (passim)
dThe processes by which the subjective is constructed are very complex, they involve parental and social discourses, words like “I” which precede the subject, identification etc; rigorously speaking, the sentence “I speak” means something like “The word 'I' speaks”. That is why the traditional subjective is in reality a-subjective.
Running Author(s) 497
in section 3.1, there are two types of bodies created by symbolization out
of sensations:
• the physical, or physiological body, i.e. the bio-physical description of the body created by the conceptualization of physics
• the emotional body created by emotional symbols (words of pain, joy,
anxiety etc).
Emotional symbols are genuine, not constructible from physiological instances. This conception is generalizable to non verbal symptoms (I refer here to the psycho-analytical conception of symptoms as symbols).
Take for instance as physiological observables skin colour, cardiac rhythm, blood pressure. The emotional observables are for instance an exchange of words (with or without an emotional content with an interlocutor). A complete discussion should include unconscious aspects, always emotional, of symbols. The two types of observables do not “commute”, they are complementary in the quantum mechanical sense: it means that an individual cannot at the same time be subject to a physiological observation and have emotional relationships. It is interesting to note that C. Bohr (father of N. Bohr and biologist) wrote:
“An organism cannot at the same time be subject to a chemical analysis and be declared as living”.
We then can have a succesion of non commutative events to describe
how an emotion can make a face blushing: white skin −! expression of
emotion −! pink skin. It is similar to the quantum measuremets of non
commutative components of ths spin: SX = +1/2 −! SZ = +1/2 −!
SX = −1/2. We so have a simplified scheme for quantum modelization of
the undeterministic evolution of the body.
4 Perspectives
The main stream in current cognitive sciences is to seek a “naturalization”
of consciousness. It is an attempt to treat Mind and consciousness as objects (however immaterial they are). An essential prediction of the present approach is that these attempts of naturalization will certainly improve our knowledge of the physical brain but not of the mind.
Secondly, many authors attempt to reconstruct, essentially thanks to
decoherence, the classical world out of the quantum level. In the present
approach, it is the classical world which precedes the quantum level: the
latter is constructed from the behavior of macroscopic apparatuses.
498 Running Title
With the concept of afterwardness briefly discussed in section 3.1 (and
formalized in Schneider (1994)) it becomes possible to reformulate the notion of consistent history (e.g. Omn`es 1994) and then transform it into a notion of “afterward history” (Schneider 2000).”
Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
MIT Press link:
The New Science of the Mind Mark Rowlands,
The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
"Those who ask whether mental processes can extend beyond the brain and into the world may seem to be asking, 'Where is my mind?' Mark Rowlands instead replaces questions about the location of cognition with a process-based vision of the mind as a complex set of activities distributed across brain, body, and world. His integrative and original book demonstrates that the cognitive sciences already treat mental processes as amalgamations of disparate neural, bodily, and environmental resources. It brings a new level of precision to the case for the extended mind."
John Sutton, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University
At google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=AiwjpL-0hDgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Mark+Rowlands,+The+New+Science+of+the+Mind:+From+Extended+Mind+to+Embodied+Phenomenology&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xNozUf3NMYSk8QSe4IGwAw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Mark Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology&f=false
REVIEW OF MARK ROWLANDS, THE NEW SCIENCE OF MIND
File not found - PhilPapers
SEE PG. 55 for epistemic and ontic interpretations of the nature of human {embodied-human} hearing
and PG
. 58-59ff for ‘extended mind’ interpretation: “transformation of information-bearing structures in the cognizing organism’s environment,” which in turn enable further cognition and insight. {quote Extended Mind list of properties on page 59}
New book by Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos,
This review is from: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Hardcover)
Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos is first and foremost a work of philosophy, not a work of pure science. Many critical reviews of his book are unfortunately miscast in this respect. What is true is that Nagel uses scientifically-derived evidence to support his philosophical arguments--exactly what any competent philosopher ought to do.
Despite the surprisingly short span of pages in the book, the arguments are hard to digest because they demand a fairly sizable familiarity with contemporary arguments in philosophy of mind and philosophy of evolutionary biology. I expect this will make the book a delight to read for those with such familiarity but challenging for those without. While the footnotes and references in the book are relatively sparse, the works cited are well-chosen and successfully do the heavy-lifting where necessary. For example, Nagel refers the reader to Michael Behe, Steven Meyer, and David Berlinski--all formidable thinkers affiliated with the Discovery Institute--when he draws attention to empirical challenges to neo-Darwinism. Nagel does not attempt to summarize these respective challenges but rather expects the reader to follow the citations on his or her own. This decision renders the book more fluid for those of us familiar with these works, but may leave the less-familiar reader perplexed by Nagel's empirical doubts about neo-Darwinism.
Nagel's efforts to embrace the quality of arguments offered by those friendly (or at least not hostile) to intelligent design, while simultaneously rejecting the inference to design himself, is refreshingly commendable. Here, Nagel embodies the sage advice of the late Robert Nozick who wrote the following in Anarchy, State, and Utopia:
"I like to think intellectual honesty demands that, occasionally at least, we go out of our way to confront strong arguments opposed to our views. How else are we to protect ourselves from continuing in error? It seems only fair to remind the reader that intellectual honesty has its dangers; arguments read perhaps at first in curious fascination may come to convince and even to seem natural and intuitive. Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth" (x-xi).
Meyer's lengthy volume Signature in the Cell (which Nagel received scorn for recommending in 2009) squeezes on the conspicuous problem of reconciling the sophisticated self-reproducing cell with inert material antecedents governed solely by chance and natural law. Nagel rightly recognizes that Meyer's treatment of the problem is provocative grounds for harboring doubts about the purely materialst account of the cell's origin. Nagel, though, leaves it up to the reader to consult Signature for the substance of Meyer's argument. Here's a representative sample of Meyer's account in Signature:
"If we assume that a minimally complex cell needs at least 250 proteins of, on average, 150 amino acids and that the probability of producing just one such protein is 1 in 10^164 as calculated above, then the probability of producing all the necessary proteins needed to service a minimally complex cell is 1 in 10^164 multiplied by itself 250 times, or 1 in 10^41,000. This kind of number allows a great amount of quibbling about the accuracy of various estimates without altering the conclusion. The probability of producing the proteins necessary to build a minimally complex cell--or the genetic information necessary to produce those proteins--by chance is unimaginably small" (213).
In his previous works The View from Nowhere and The Last Word, Nagel firmly established himself as a serious philosophical realist. Nagel labored extensively in The View from Nowhere to include the reality of subjective states in our ontology:
"I have argued that the seductive appeal of objective reality depends on a mistake. It is not the given. Reality is not just objective reality. Sometimes, in the philosophy of mind but also elsewhere, the truth is not to be found by travelling as far away from one's personal perspective as possible" (27).
Nagel fortified his philosophical realism in The Last Word by attacking popular forms of skepticism--subjectivism and relativism:
"Many forms of relativism and subjectivism collapse into either self-contradiction or vacuity--self-contradiction because they end up claiming that nothing is the case, or vacuity because they boil down to the assertion that anything we say or believe is something we say or believe" (6).
In Mind and Cosmos, he continues this tradition with particular emphasis on consciousness and mental properties, like reason and value. His treatment of this task bears the marks of a man honestly attempting to reconcile what is plainly evident about this world with systematic findings of science and mathematics. Nagel insists that there must be a fit between theory and lived life--if ever the two are in conflict, it is theory that must revise itself, not the realities of lived life. Here, he is diametrically opposed to views such as those espoused by Susan Blackmore in Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Blackmore writes:
"We can hang on to the way [the self] feels and assume that a persisting self or soul or spirit exists...or we can reject any persisting entity that corresponds to our feeling of being a self. I think that intellectually we have to take this last path. The trouble is that it is very hard to accept in one's personal life....It means accepting that every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction...This is tough, but I think it gets easier with practice" (81).
Nagel, as I suspect most conscious beings do, steadfastly refuses to allow theory to dictate the absurd proposition that he needs to "practice" denying his own selfhood. For Nagel, the mind is neither reducible to the brain nor an epiphenomon of the brain merely because materialistic theory requires it; rather, the mind (including its ineliminative subjective nature) is a bona fide ingredient of the natural world, and whatever theory of reality aims to correctly explain this fact must accept mind as it actually is:
"Materialist naturalism leads to reductionist ambitions because it seems unacceptable to deny the reality of all those familiar things that are not at first glance physical. But if no plausible reduction is available, and if denying reality to the mental continues to be unacceptable, that suggests that the original premise, materialist naturalism, is false, and not just around the edges" (Mind and Cosmos, 15).
Such a stance is radical only in the sense that it resists the predominant commitments of the age-- not radical in the sense that it runs afoul of philosophical coherence. What is remarkable about Nagel's project is that he keeps his sights steadily aimed at the very reality we are attempting to explain. Not only are we interested in the very fabric of this thing we call consciousness, but we also want to know how in the world it is able to direct its awareness onto a myriad of subjects (intentionality); process raw data into holistic, abstract, and non-immediate generalizations about the world (cognition); and contort thoughts and behaviors into alignment with stance-independent maxims of right and wrong, good and bad (values). Rather than deny the existence of these features or appeal to some future, unknown material process that designates these features as physical "residues" of one sort or another, he takes them as fundamental elements of nature. As such, he resolutely maintains that these features must be explained, not explained away.
A particularly formidable challenge to neo-Darwinism Nagel mentioned in The Last Word and repeated in Mind and Cosmos shares the philosophical stage with Alvin Plantinga, who crystallized the argument in his 2011 work Where the Conflict Really Lies. The argument suggests that, on a Darwinian evolutionary account of mind, only cognitive functions (e.g. beliefs) that improve survival fitness will be "seen" by natural selection; the content of the beliefs--e.g. whether or not the beliefs are true--are of no material consequence to the selection mechanism. If Smith believes, for example, that Mercury is larger in diameter than Jupiter, but all of his other immediate perceptual faculties are operating properly such that he eats when he's hungry, finds warmth when he's cold, and runs when he sees danger, natural selection cannot select against his (apparently) mistaken belief about celestial bodies. For all we know given neo-Darwinism, that belief simply came "along for the ride" when natural selection fixed a particular brain state in Smith for other reasons. The conclusion from this argument is that our cognitive faculties, given neo-Darwinism, do not reliably produce true beliefs with respect to non-perceptual, non-immediate beliefs. Thus, whatever non-perceptual, non-immediate beliefs these cognitive faculties generate are not reliably true. Neo-Darwinism is one such non-perceptual, non-immediate belief generated by these cognitive faculties. Thus, belief in neo-Darwinism is unreliable. Hence, neo-Darwinism is self-defeating: Neo-Darwinism undermines the very cognitive faculties that generate belief in neo-Darwinism. Nagel writes in Mind and Cosmos:
"I agree with Alvin Plantinga that, unlike divine benevolence, the application of evolutionary theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our confidence in them. Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts of the world as a whole" (28).
Nagel's critique of the adequacy of the materialist, neo-Darwininian account of consciousness, cognition, and value is sharp and biting; however, his proposed alternative has received nearly universal criticism from reviewers. Nagel records his personal aversion to theistic alternatives without much by way of sustained argument. This approach is understandably disappointing to reviewers like Alvin Plantinga and William Dembski who have labored patiently to make their respective cases for theism in the face of unbridled academic hostility, but Nagel's proposed alternative--teleological naturalism--is offered by Nagel with a great deal of circumspection:
Teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are 'biased toward the marvelous'....I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn't" (Mind and Cosmos, 92-3).
As one who has nothing invested in any particular outcome, I welcome Nagel's bold consideration of this teleological alternative. Like him, I am not confident that it makes sense, but it is a welcome deviation from the traditional dichotomy of materialism and theism. As a matter of personal taste, I would prefer Nagel to take up the task of systematically addressing the theistic alternative though. His writings have thus far suggested to me that he is driven to atheism by conviction rather than argument. To wit, Nagel in The Last Word: "It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that" (130). Such locutions strongly lead me to suspect Nagel's teleological alternative is a reluctant solution rather than an invigorated one.
In any case, Mind and Cosmos is a great contribution to an immensely interesting and lively philosophical debate. I recommend studying the work carefully and following up on his works cited.”
