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(My discussion of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos continues from my last post. For readers' convenience, I am including the final paragraph from Part 1.)
To sum up:
The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which things as they are make sense, and that includes the way the physical world is, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind. (53)
Cognition
Apart from the question of where our consciousness came from in the first place, Nagel raises the question of Cognition – our ability to reason and to discover the truth about the world around us. Granted that we have consciousness, it’s conceivable that we could have thoughts occur to our brains, but where would the ability come from to think thoughts that are true – i.e., that correspond to objective reality? In other words, if we assume that all our thoughts are at their base simply physical and chemical reactions, why should those thoughts caused by our brains have any basis in reality?
We know that our senses are not fundamentally
reliable. We often see or hear or feel things – or think we do – that are not there
or are not what we think they are. At a
more fundamental level, what looks solid to our eyes, and feels solid to our
touch, is mostly empty space (i.e., atoms are not solid material “balls” but
mostly empty space). And how many thoughts and convictions that mankind has
held for countless ages throughout its history have turned out to be quite
false? For example, for thousands of years, beginning with the Mesopotamians
and even into the modern world, people have been convinced that their lives
were controlled or at least affected by the stars (astrology). For people like philosopher
Daniel Dennett (a materialist and atheist), human beings seem to have an
inherent proclivity (developed through evolution) toward belief in God and the
supernatural. He would say that that idea (which he considers quite false – an
illusion) may have been conducive to survival in times past (even though false),
but today, with our knowledge of science, is no longer helpful – it is merely a
relic from past evolution that we need to get rid of asap because it blinds us
to the materialist atheist reality of the world. If that is true – if we really
do have a proclivity toward belief in beings that don’t exist, what confidence
can we have that our cognition regarding other things is not equally
misguided – including such theories as evolution and materialism? In particular, such basic forms of reasoning
as logic and mathematics? Are those ideas any more true than belief in
the divine? Evolution may be able to explain such basic mental abilities as are
necessary to survive in the world (in order for our species to survive we must
be able accurately to perceive that a lion really is chasing us!), but what
about these more advanced and elevated types of reasoning as mathematics and
science? Does a thorough understanding of atoms and the cosmos somehow give us
a greater chance of survival? In any case, how much confidence can we have in
any given theory or idea if our minds are no more than accidental products of a
blind material process? Darwin himself once admitted in a private letter, "With
me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which
has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at
all trustworthy."
Despite his conviction that mind and consciousness must have been present “at the beginning,” Nagel rejects the obvious explanation for this, namely the existence of a creator God. For one who is so inclined, it seems strange that he repeatedly avoids what seems to be the natural conclusion of his arguments: if mind and consciousness are unlikely to have originated from random combinations of chemicals, there must be an overarching Mind of some sort that brought it about. Yet Nagel insists that he does not have the “sense of divinity” that leads many people to “see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling.” Theism, he says, for him, is no more plausible than materialism. He is interested “in the territory between them.” (22) He seems to view the theory that there is some sort of Great Mind that is “outside the system” is a kind of cheating. Instead, he prefers what he calls “monism” that tries to explain the system on its own terms, without bringing in an external deity or an external dualistic concept where “body” and “mind” are separate, or even incompatible, aspects of reality. Finally, he seems to feel that the great “problem of evil” in the world militates against the existence of God (i.e., if God is good and all-powerful, why does evil exist?).
So if mind has always been inherent in the world, but God is not the cause, where does he think our consciousness comes from? He refuses to be dogmatic in any way about his ideas in this regard, but he is strongly inclined to see some sort of inherent disposition in nature toward mind and consciousness, a disposition that materialists refuse to consider. He identifies this as a kind of “panpsychism,” meaning that “all the elements of the physical world are also mental.” In other words, “everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and non-physical.” Thus, consciousness and rationality did not need to be “invented” at some point in the past. All matter has “protopsychic” properties. His “mission” with this book appears to be an attempt to get scientists and others thinking along these lines and away from dogmatic materialism. He does not claim to have the final answer but believes he is on the right track, pointing ahead to the path that others should follow.
Most intriguing, for me, are his references to the idea of “teleology,” meaning that there is a “direction” to life, that the development of life (and consciousness) is somehow part of nature. I find this a stunning idea, because history shows that the abandonment of teleology was one of the fundamental shifts in human thought that accompanied the Scientific Revolution in and around the 17th century. Aristotle – and Aristotelianism, which was the reigning authoritative philosophy of Europe up to the Renaissance and beyond – proclaimed that “goal” and “purpose” were an essential part of how the world worked. For the medieval Christian followers of Aristotle, this purposiveness was directly tied to God and God’s intents and purposes. But for Aristotle himself, who believed in a kind of deity but not in a personal god in the Christian sense, divinity did not have conscious “intentions,” but all things by nature had a purpose and goal of “becoming” something. The inherent purpose (goal, or telos in Greek) of an acorn is to become an oak tree, and so on, even though it has no conscious “intention” of becoming one.
This concept of teleology as something that is an aspect of nature was taken for granted throughout the medieval period, but was rejected with the rise of science, which chose to focus narrowly on mechanical aspects of nature – how an acorn becomes an oak tree rather than why. Thus it is quite stunning for Nagel to try to revive the notion of teleology in connection with science. He admits that such a way of accounting for life and consciousness may have “serious problems,” but again, he is attempting to split the difference between traditional science and traditional religion, and his solution is to argue that there must be some aspect inherent in nature that brings about life and consciousness, even without the existence of any conscious mind contributing to the process. “The tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the nonteleological laws of physics and chemistry. This seems like an admissible conjecture given the available evidence.” (124)
As a Latter-day Saint, I am intrigued by this thesis/conjecture. On the one hand I believe that there is definitely a place for an intentional, preexisting Mind (i.e., God) in the creation of this earth and its inhabitants. Furthermore, the simplest and most obvious reason that the appearance of life seems to be a miracle (as Francis Crick admitted, as well as Brian Silver, above) is that it is one. And the reason that both the origin and the development of life seems to be designed by an agent (as the evolutionists fully admit), is because it was so designed. On the other hand, Latter-day Saints do not conceive of a God who simply created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), purely in accordance with the dictates of his own mind. To some extent (and we don’t know enough to say to what extent), God was following preexisting law as well as logic in formulating the world. Certainly the moral laws of good and evil are eternal in their essence, and not only because God decreed them to be so. Again, we have not been given enough knowledge to understand how all this works, but Latter-day Saint theology asserts that although God is all-powerful, he must still work within the confines of “universal law.” So the idea of some kind of inherent bias in the cosmos toward life and consciousness is not farfetched, to my way of thinking. I would suggest that that concept is probably true (again, in some sense!), and that God’s role in creation is not to create everything (i.e., natural law) from scratch but to harness those natural forces in an organized way. Anyone who would like to pursue this question further, take a look at James McLachlan's recent article (2021) in BYU Studies Quarterly (see their website), "Is God Subject to or the Creator of Eternal Law?"
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