Mind and cosmos
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.
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- (philosophy and computer science background, but that's long in the past I just do engineering for big corpo)
They're not exactly casually absorbed, as in a wiki or forum. But you can read some books that begin to introduce these ideas. On the topic of consciousness, less academic and more slated towards general audience: Reality+ by David Chalmers and Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel and Galileo's Error by Phillip Goff will give you and interesting gamut of ideas.
The thing about arguments in philosophy is that they span from a very old web of thought that has been refined into very sharp positions over a long time. So you will find yourself ever recursively going back to understand ideas and framing with more precision.
This is why it's difficult to casually get into these topics IMO. There's just been so much said and discussed, to understand the current meta (as the gaming folks might say), you have to understand how we arrived at the current meta. And that's a long journey that's never complete!
- Philosophy is currently the only subject which can teach us about sentience (which I would define as the ability to experience.) This is because the subject matter of the sciences is the external world. During the scientific revolution, this limitation of science was, however, more generally and explicitly acknowledged than it is today, where there seems to be a lot of confusion about it. A good book on this stuff is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.
I do agree that the terminology is unfortunately convoluted. The main term is “consciousness,” which does often seem unclear to me.
The basic mystery is just the ability to experience/feel, and is an undeniable part of life, for humans and at least some animals.
- > your decisions are being made > before your are consciousnessly aware of them
Yes, I'm aware of these studies.
But they make the mistake of presupposing materialist reductionism a priori, as if it were actually true.
Those who assume materialist reductionism have an entire set of questions they are incapable of answering, such as:
1) How can teleology arise from non-teleology? 2) Whence consciousness? 3) How can something come from nothing?
There is a great deal of evidence that materialism is not the best explanation for Reality. If you want to see some of this evidence, read "Mind and Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel.
- Reviews of Nagel's book by actual philosophers:
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/mind-and-cosmos-why-the-material...
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/do-you-only-have-b...
- From The Nation's review:
> In support of his skepticism [about the soundness of scientific explanations of nature], Nagel writes: “The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.” This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos.
Nagel doesn't seem to give science credit where credit is due.
I find Daniel Dennett a much more interesting read because he actually wrestles with the philosophical implications of the scientific revolution, rather than rejecting scientific naturalism basically because it doesn't "feel right".
From Dennett's work I recommend Darwin's Dangerous Idea, especially the discussion of "cranes" and "skyhooks". Dennett says that, according to evolutionary theory, the complex structure of the world is built from the bottom up by a sequence of cranes (upon cranes upon cranes...) rather than being dropped from the mysterious, omnipotent heavens by "skyhooks".
- The term 'consciousness' is somewhat overloaded. I prefer 'subjectivity' to denote the strange fact that there is something there is like to be me--cf. Thomas Nagel's essay 'What is it like to be a bat?'. This subjectivity seems absent in the science of enlightenment thinkers who were driven to find the 'objective' laws of nature.
Nagel wrote a controversial book towards the end of his life called 'Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False' where he argues that this very subjectivity cannot be fit into any current materialist theory. I tend to agree with this view--reducing subjectivity to a metaphenomena of complexity seems to be a completely hollow definition. Why does it exist?
