Opinion
Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Book written by Thomas Nagel
Reviewed by Ralph Grabowski
There are some people, who believing in deterministic materialism, cling to Darwin's theory of chemical and biological evolution as if it were a life raft, kicking out into the cold any who dare counter them, such as, say, religious nutcases.
But there’s a problem: the random mutations that drive evolution cannot explain the higher levels at which humans operate. Unlike animals, we have the ability to reason and to hold values. Evolution also lacks explanations for how the foundations of chemistry and biology came into existence – physics and mathematics.
To visualize the problem, let's stack the levels that define the world as we understand it. Each higher level is dependent on all of the other ones below it. We cannot have physics, for example, without mathematics; we cannot have values without a mind that can reason.
? ? ?
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Values
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Mind-Reason
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Biology
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Chemistry
==================
Physics
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Mathematics
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? ? ?
The question marks at the bottom and the top indicate the fact that we don't know what undergirds mathematics, nor what lies above values.
Evolution can be used to explain some of the developments of biology and chemistry; both of them contain elements that change over time. Physics and mathematics, on the other hand, are unchanging, despite the ardent efforts of intersectionalists. At the other extreme, material determinists extend evolution to explain the mind, reason, and values in areas like psychology, anthropology, and even astronomy. This is the reasoning that’s at work when you hear someone explain, “...due to evolution,” hiding behind the sense that they really have no explanation. It’s the god-of-the-gaps for the ungod crowd.
Why we have minds that reasons and acts on values – rather than minds that only ever react without thinking through consequences, such as in animals – is a puzzle to be solved. The three possibilities are these:
A. As humans evolved from animals we also co-evolved higher-order minds and then developed value systems based on our interactions with others.
B. A supreme being external to the universe, such as the Jewish God YHWH, created humans separately from animals, and then injected his image into them, which consists of reason and values.
C. Some other mechanism has yet to be discovered.
When it comes to A and B, both sides have their hard-core-ists. Material determinists go as far as stating categorically that we have no free will; me, writing this article, for instance, is pre-determined by chemicals interacting in my brain biology, and so I could not not do this. (Love is just a "romeo-juliet syndrome" is how one science fiction writer put it.) At the other end are hardcore creationists who won't consider any explanation beyond a six-day creation taking place in 4004BC.
Both sides, I argue, are insecure in their position. Allowing free will into the tent of the determinist camp would mean that science cannot explain everything -- anathema! (I chuckled the other day at the claim, made in earnest, that "Science has proved determinism is true.") For the creationist to go beyond young-earth creationism is to allow the possibility of long-term changes wrought by an evolutionary process. In both camps, nothing is more likely to generate a shunning than to admit the g- and e-words, respectively.
The problem is that science cannot study what it cannot study. The land beyond science is sometimes known as metaphysics. We can either admit that such a land exists, or else we can co-opt it, turning the metaphysical into the physical; or can we ignore it exists.
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Philosopher and lawyer Thomas Nagel tackles the problem we have been talking about here in "Mind & Cosmos." The problem is how evolution developed at a human mind that reasons and has value preferences. He has a legal mind, and so he presents the problem; having a philosophical mind, he tries various approaches to solving the problem. As he is an atheist, he includes the intelligent designer option, albeit distastefully. Never mind, at least he considers it as an option, which is more broad-minded than other commentators on the subject.
For how we arrived at a reasoning mind, he presents too many options for me to list here. For the establishment of values, however, he zeros in on a simple use-case: pleasure and pain. He defines values as caring about ourselves and others, and then argues that we developed values, because we discovered the positive aspects of pleasure (such as giving a present to someone) and negative aspects of pain (such as being rejected by a once-trusted friend).
"I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world," he writes. "It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps." Or as Nancy Peary put it, evolution is the acid that eats everything.
He grasps the nub of current state in the Western world, where some have the arrogance to stand atop civilization confident that all they know is all that is knowable, and that variations are unthinkable -- not just in science, but politics and religion as well.
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I do not recommend that you read this book without some background in philosophy or theology, as it involves concepts like epistemology and teleological meaning. The chapters are numbered, meaning that the table of contents can't provide an outline of the author's thought progress. Indeed, it took me quite some time to get through the small-format 128 pages, as I had to pause to take in what had just been presented, or to reread the last section.
Should you begin reading this book, I advise that you begin with the Conclusion -- just two pages -- as your introduction to reading his work.
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
by Thomas Nagel
$35.95
144 pages, hardcover
Published 2012 by Oxford University Press
ISBN 9780199919758
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