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

"I think one of the most interesting philosophy books of recent times is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos . Nagel is a hugely influential and respected philosopher of recent times, and I think this book really shocked the philosophy world when it was published in 2012 with the subtitle “ Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.” Maybe he felt bold enough to publish this controversial book in his older years, but he was arguing that a range of phenomena – consciousness, moral knowledge, reason – cannot be accounted for, in his view, in the traditional materialist Darwinian framework. Ultimately, he said that we need a new paradigm, and although we don’t know what it is, here’s a first guess: teleological laws with purposes built into them. He built upon a rigorous framework for thinking about teleological laws that was formulated by John Hawthorne and Daniel Nolan. They don’t necessarily believe in teleological laws, but they have a rigorous way of making sense of them. This was an act of heresy and it got treated as such. The book received incredibly aggressive reviews. Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg called it “an instrument of mischief”. Steven Pinker tweeted that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker”. A lot of these attacks were made because in the introduction Nagel expresses sympathy for the intelligent design movement in biology, which argues that the facts of biology can’t be explained within a Darwinian framework. That’s not something I’ve ever supported, and that’s out of my area of expertise – I’m not a biologist; I’m a philosopher. Maybe Nagel was going a bit out of his area of expertise there, and that’s why people laid into him, but that was only a passing reference in the introduction. The core arguments of the book are based on these philosophical arguments around consciousness, moral knowledge, and reason. He’s engaged in a systematic project. Nagel supports the anti-physicalist view about consciousness, which I also support. That’s a fairly significant minority view. He also thinks that has greater implications than philosophers had previously realised. It doesn’t affect only consciousness; it affects how we think about these other phenomena, such as cognition, and how consciousness evolved historically. He distinguishes a constitutive explanation of consciousness – how does the brain make consciousness here and now? – from a historical explanation of consciousness. How does the brain create my experience right now, and also, why did consciousness evolve over history? Nagel argues that the anti-physicalist position raises problems for our traditional Darwinian way of thinking about the latter question. It’s a very interesting book and I believe that history will be kinder to it than were the reviews that immediately followed."