new book – ‘Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False’ by Thomas Nagel
Written on September 3, 2012
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel (Oxford University Press)
(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – Nov 2012)
Book description from the publisher:
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.
Nagel’s skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.
Google Books preview:
See also: Thomas Nagel at Wikipedia
Filed in: consciousness,philosophy of mind,reality.
Oh, PUHlez, folks, pay close attention this time, ’cause I got really tired of repeating this back when Behe, Dembski, et al. tried to pull a scientist’s gown over creationism and got it stripped off by Judge Jones.
The Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t exlplain why custards set when heated. The Theory of Relativity doesn’t explain why it takes much longer to get TO an odious family event than to get BACK from it.
What’s that you say? The Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t CLAIM TO explain why custards set when heated … and The Theory of Relativity doesn’t CLAIM TO explain why it takes much longer to get to an odious family event than to get back from it?
So you all DO understand that a scientific theory need not explain EVERYTHING — or even all of the things it addresses, or any of it completely — to be not just viable but also the best prevailing theory, right?
And you understand that the burden is on a challenging theory to (a) explain EVERYTHING explained by the prevailing theory AT LEAST as well and (b) ALSO explain things not explained by the prevailing theory in a testable manner (e.g., “and then a miracle happened” is not testable), right?
So why is it that morons like the I.D. gang and this Nagel dude (who is beloved of the Dishonesty Institute — oops, I meant “Discovery,” Freudian slip, sorry) can con you with the “if it doesn’t explain things that it doesn’t addess, it’s ‘ripe for displacement’ ” BS?
It’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Anyone who has ever believed anything that challenges the “Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature” should shut the hell up and read Kuhn, and then shut the hell up.