The American philosopher Thomas Nagel is like the child with the emperor's new clothes – except that he keeps pointing to something he insists is there and that the others don't see. For the last 60 years, virtually all philosophers of mind have trumpeted a solution to the mind/body problem – physicalism, the claim that mental states (thoughts, feelings, sensations) are nothing but brain activities, and that the so-called ‘mental’ thus reduces to the physical, and ultimately to scientific explanation. For the last 40 years, Nagel has been pointing out that you can't solve a problem if you leave out precisely what needs to be solved – in this case, mind's key feature, consciousness. ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ famously asked his paper of that title in 1974. Science, which aims to grasp everything as it really is – in itself, irrespective of how it appears – can ever more fully acquaint us with bats' sonar perceptual equipment; but not with how perceiving with it feels. How can the uncentred objective ‘view from nowhere’ accommodate the perspectived ‘view from here’ (bat's or human's)? Certainly my body and brain processes are items in the scientific inventory, but not the fact that this body, among all the other human bodies, is mine, and ‘the taste is me’. So the supposedly-answered question of mind is left untouched.
Nagel has received respect, if resistance, for his stand on the mind/body problem, as long as he kept that problem self-contained. In his latest book, however, Nagel argues that mind, rather than being an ‘add-on’, and its nature a local issue, ‘infects’ the entire scientific enterprise. Omitting subjectivity, and regarding the world as nothing but developed and developing matter, has vitiated our account of reality. Although ‘everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science’, the evolutionary account is not only inadequate but wrong.
Has this eminent philosopher gone mad or become a born-again Christian? is the implication in his fellow-philosophers' reviews of Mind and Cosmos. (And Nagel has after all picked some odd bedfellows by defending proponents of the Intelligent Design Theory in his recent articles and statements.) Nagel, however, agrees that God turns out either to be ‘a stopping-point in the pursuit of understanding’ or a supernatural kick-starter that leaves the natural order as it is still requiring scientific explanation. But he adds that the human mind has been put in much the same position as the Divine Mind. Descartes and Galileo – on discovering that colours, tastes, smells, feels and sounds do not exist in objects the way that we perceive them–located the perceiving of these attributes as somehow outside the physical world in which primary qualities (mathematically-measurable size, shape, weight, number and motion) are exactly as they seem, and remain the same whether perceived or unperceived. And current material monism strangely resembles Cartesian dualism – except that where Descartes split off, and therefore acknowledged, the perceiver, physicalists deny, yet inadvertently rely, on it. Just as water has turned out to be H2O, they happily say, so tasting or seeing water will turn out to be some yet-to-be-ascertained brain processes. But, says Nagel, to assert that sort of identity is to put perceptible, publicly accessible stuff – water and neurons – on a par with perception itself. Water and its properties can exist without being experienced; tasting or seeing water cannot. ‘Our perceptual experiences aren't part of the water; they are just effects it has on our senses.’
If neural firings (which are potentially observable by several people) are the same as the taste of water, what is it that makes them the same? So odd does it sound to assert the identity of two such dissimilar entities, says Nagel, that, in order to avoid appealing to anything non-physical, philosophers have to bring into their increasingly sophisticated theories all sorts of things and relations that are external to the neural firings, and actually non-identical with them.
And, Nagel argues, material monism has the same sort of difficulty when dealing with objectivity as it has with subjectivity. It has to simultaneously smuggle into its theories exactly what is supposed to be left out of them. For evolutionists, natural selection serves exactly the same role as the benevolent God-Who-would-not-deceive-us does for Descartes. Natural selection, like the Cartesian God, is asserted inevitably to lead us to true beliefs, and guarantee the authenticity of our attunement to the laws and structure of nature. But to claim that we are thus attuned surely begs the question. The reason and intelligibility that science presupposes have to be read into the natural order, and this (argues Nagel) cannot be done without circularity. Evolutionary theory requires that each state of the world at any time is latent in whatever preceded it, that the germ of what now exists is contained in its ur-version. Could there then be ‘countless atoms of miniature rationality’? asks Nagel. Surely reason is all or nothing. Reason is what validates the evolutionary account, so can hardly be regarded as just ‘a biologically based disposition, whose reliability we can determine on other grounds’. The evolutionary account undermines itself by arguing away the very process by which it was established, and on which it relies.
Nagel disarmingly allows that he is no scientist, nor, he implies, does he need to be in order to make objections to the scientific status quo. Certainly his arguments are provocative and telling, but it is unclear what they actually come to. He seems to concede that consciousness could evolve in a fragmentary way, even if reason could not, that it is at least a conceivable possibility that the complex conscious subject has been ‘built up out of minimal proto-mental elements’. He also seems to envisage fully-fledged reason as being intrinsically part of the fabric of things. But surely that is to go down the line of Victorian theories of vitalism, or of psychic magnetic and electrical currents, which always prove frustrating and futile. Flattened into nature, subjectivity loses its viewpoint and becomes simply another form of stuff, and highly dubious stuff at that. It becomes mysterious, mere verbiage, or simply cancels out, leaving everything as it is, in exactly the way (as Nagel points out) ‘God’ does in the theistic account.
Nagel delineates the mistakenness of relegating appearances to a province outside the physical, but it may be that he falls into the opposite and complementary mistake, which the first error ultimately and ironically horseshoes round into. Descartes excluded mind and appearances from the physical and objective, yet also squashed them down into it. For he converted the subjective viewpoint into a ghostly object – the ‘mental substance’, the ‘thinking thing’ – thus forfeiting the perspectival stance which is precisely what he was aiming to achieve. Except that it does not occupy space, and is supposedly first-personal and transparent to itself, the ‘thinking thing’ is yet another, if immaterial, object in the public arena.
This too is the danger of panpsychism, the position (which Nagel perhaps holds) that consciousness, whole or embryonic, pervades the universe. As a champion of subjectivity, my heart leaps up when I read about James Lovelock's Gaia, or Timothy Sprigge's Absolute Idealism, or Hegel's notion of reason coming to fruition through history. But it soon sinks again. The very thing that these positions seek to embrace, they avoid, and the very thing that they seek to avoid, they embrace. Based on awareness of how the view from here, the seeming to me, the what-it-is-like-for …, are outlawed from scientific accounts of reality, they then seek to lasso them in again.
That is not what Nagel intends. He says he wants to revive an Aristotelian conception of nature, in which reason and value are not weird contingent outcroppings but intrinsic to reality as a whole, because reality has a purpose, a telos. ‘On a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because that is part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life, with all its possibilities of development and variation. In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.’ But what could this mean? ‘Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.’ In this assertion Nagel recalls Hegel (‘Reason is the law of the world, and … therefore, in world history, things have come about rationally.’ ‘The question of how Reason is determined in itself and what its relation is to the world coincides with the question What is the ultimate purpose of the world?’) Inspiring, Romantic, and if only it were true, but the trouble is, why is evolving Reason so unconscious of its evolving, and indeed so seemingly unevolved? Why does it so very much not look as if ‘To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back’?
