5/10

[I will type up my page by page notes as a review for this later. For now it is enough to say that I don't agree with Nagel on just about anything here, except that the task of explaining consciousness is extremely arduous.] ( )

Scientific materialism posits that consciousness is an illusion. Creationisst suggest it is all made by God. For some of us neither of these takes work. Nagel has the formal philosophy to think it through and suggests there may well be a middle way to understand how life, consciousness, reason and value came to be. A middle way that does not dismiss what is manifestly evident (that we are conscious and subjectively self-aware) and does not invoke intelligent design. Nagel doesn't know what the middle way is but suggests a middle way, probably teleological, is a valid hypothesis to explore.

Que the ear smoke. ( )

Thomas Nagel is a well-respected doctor of philosophy at New York University. In this book he puts forth many interesting and compelling arguments against the idea that Darwinian evolution is the complete explanation of life on earth.

At times in the book Nagel demolishes the idea that Darwinism is true, later he will seem to undoubtedly support the basic concepts of evolution and even support natural selection. After reading the book completely he seems to rationalize these two views by disregarding certain principles and conclusions of evolution but accepting the fossil record and the view that we have ‘evolved’ from previous life, all the way back to bacteria. He even believes in a limited natural selection for the process by which humans have come to be. He does reject the idea that simply by understanding current physics and chemistry we could evolve to our current diversity and intelligence of life, which he feels is a major component of Darwinism. He feels that natural selection is an incomplete and insufficient way to explain the consciousness, cognition, and values that humans have
Dr. Nagel makes clear many times he is a strict atheist so this book is not based on theological arguments. If Dr. Nagel were a theist then his personal views would likely line up very closely with intelligent design and he appreciates the viewpoint and feels it adds to the conversation surrounding life on earth.
Dr. Nagel feels that a major shortcoming of Darwinism is that it fails to explain consciousness; also that evolution and natural selection would fail to predict that conscious, cognizant beings would come about. He states that a theory that could have predicted the conscious, cognizant life on earth would be more appealing. Dr. Nagel argues that if we were to observe the primitive earth we could not have predicted that life would evolve because the physical and chemical probabilities of complex molecules necessary for life evolving is just too low; he views this as a major problem of Darwinism. For example in the introduction he states, “The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical model becomes…. But it seems to me… the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.”
He spends a large part of the book arguing against psychophysical reductionism (meaning that psychology and biology can be understood completely by physics and chemistry if you were to just have all the information about the chemistry/physics of the system). He feels that Darwinism is based on psychophysical reductionism and that is one reason why it does not explain the given data as well as could another theory which would fundamentally incorporate a bias towards conscious life.

Dr. Nagel does not give a full explanation for a competing hypothesis, but does express sympathy towards intelligent design, except for the inherent Creator. He feels a theory should show an internal bias towards organization and intelligent conscious life, which would explain that despite the physical and chemical probabilities life was very likely to develop on Earth.

Although this book is only 128 pages, it is not exactly a quick read. Dr. Nagel is a doctor of philosophy and he writes like one. This book is readable to a lay person, but will only be understandable if you take the time to learn such terms as realism, anti-realism, reductionism, anti-reductionism, monism, teleology, and so forth. I took two philosophy classes in undergrad that helped me understand many of the basic terms but still felt myself quite unprepared for the massive use of philosophical terms and arguments. He does use analogies that simplify the argument and overall the book is very well written and quite comprehendible, especially if you are willing to understand the basic philosophical terms he uses.

I read three reviews before I read the book; I prefer the reviews by The New Republic and National Review and found the one by The Nation to seem defensive and small minded, especially after reading the book.
( )

Materialistic neo-Darwinism is a view that there have been enough viable chance mutations to allow natural selection to account for the present diversity of life. Critiques of this position have constructed models using the rate of mutations and the age of life on earth to show that chance could not have been the cause.

Those critiques, although repeatedly made, have simply entered the culture war between atheists and theists, but they have not been adequately answered and so neo-Darwinism, from a purely rational perspective, has been falsified. This is what Nagel refers to in his subtitle when he claims that neo-Darwinism is "almost certainly false".

Nagel's main concern, however, is to explain, using ideas from the philosophy of mind, why one should expect the program of neo-Darwinism would be falsified. He approaches the problem reminiscent of his earlier work, Mortal Questions, where he introduces panpsychism which is a way to construct a monism of mind and matter upon which reductive science can continue.

The main reason to read this book is to follow his argument since it is central to current questions in the philosophy of mind and could be considered one way to salvage an atheistic approach to nature as its failure to make materialism work becomes ever more evident. ( )

Disappointing. Thomas Nagel argues against reductionist materialism, which assumes the explanation for everything that exists (including consciousness and subjective experience) can be found in physical laws and chemical processes. And he does this without relying on any supernatural beings to put their thumbs on the scale (Nagel is an atheist). So far so interesting – scientists in a variety of disciplines: physics, biology, neuroscience – are themselves starting to challenge the mechanistic models of reality that have come to dominate their disciplines (Nagel cites almost none of them). But then he engages in a kind of “reductionist idealism” in which human consciousness is reduced to rational intelligence, and the world is still governed by timeless, eternal principles that are rationally intelligible and yet inexplicable in material terms. Back to Plato! This is just old school Western Phil, which ignores the fact that human consciousness has many other layers and tools for understanding besides rational inquiry, that social construction plays a role in establishing value, and also ignores the idea that EVERYTHING may be capable of evolving, even physical laws, that there may be no “timeless truths” in nature, just more or less durable ones. It’s more interesting to listen to scientists like Rupert Sheldrake (biologist), Gerald Edelman (neuroscientist) or Lee Smolin (physicist) attack the mechanistic problem and start to identify new ways of thinking about it, instead of just retreading an old one with its own blinders. ( )