Abstract
The article reviews the book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel.
Highlights
Revolve around the following two claims: (i) that biology is, in principle, exhaustively explainable in terms of physics and chemistry, and (ii) that evolutionary psychology provides an adequate, if approximate, basis for conceiving of all things pertaining to human life as no more than a highly complex result brought about by the motions of physical particles occurring in conformity with specifiable laws
E third chapter, “Consciousness,” leads to a broadly conceived elaboration of the thesis that physical science cannot enable us to understand those salient features of consciousness that, in being irreducibly subjective, correspond to a strikingly different part of our world
Consciousness, is an area of philosophical terrain with which Nagel may be said to be exceptionally well acquainted. His exemplary essay “What is it like to be a bat?” turned out to be one of the driving forces behind the instigation of the booming field of consciousness studies. (See, for example, Chalmers’ book e Conscious Mind,[1] which offers a similar view of materialism)
Summary
B R revolve around the following two claims: (i) that biology is, in principle, exhaustively explainable in terms of physics and chemistry, and (ii) that evolutionary psychology provides an adequate, if approximate, basis for conceiving of all things pertaining to human life as no more than a highly complex result brought about by the motions of physical particles occurring in conformity with specifiable laws. Revolve around the following two claims: (i) that biology is, in principle, exhaustively explainable in terms of physics and chemistry, and (ii) that evolutionary psychology provides an adequate, if approximate, basis for conceiving of all things pertaining to human life as no more than a highly complex result brought about by the motions of physical particles occurring in conformity with specifiable laws. E third chapter, “Consciousness,” leads to a broadly conceived elaboration of the thesis that physical science cannot enable us to understand those salient features of consciousness that, in being irreducibly subjective, correspond to a strikingly different part of our world.
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