Mind and Matter

  An unfavorable but thought-provoking review earlier this month in The New York Review of Books introduced me to both the renowned NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel and his recent book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Even if the review had been favorable, the subtitle of the book alone would normally have caused me to shrug and move on to other things.  Those who follow this blog know I'm not patient with philosophical prattlings about the nature of the universe.  (See my posting Whence the Universe.)  Nagel's book seemed to be of that ilk.

  But I was arrested by a summary of Nagel's perspective given by the reviewer:

There are teleological laws of nature that we don't yet know about and they bias the unfolding of the universe in certain desirable directions, including the formation of complex organisms and consciousness. 

That reminded me of my son David's panpsychism, which I mentioned last month in Philosophy, Schmilosophy!  He believes that all of creation is permeated with consciousness and develops with an ethereal, beneficent purpose.  I embrace the polar-opposite outlook, that the cosmos evolves purely randomly, without any transcendental goal.  I decided to read Nagel's book to see if it might shed further light on this dichotomy.

***

  First off, and a little disconcertingly, Nagel acknowledges his debt to creationists for having kept alive the possibility of an alternative to materialistic Darwinism.  He in fact joins them in three contentions: (1) the probability of an accidental formation of self-reproducing living matter from inanimate matter is infinitesimal; (2) even if living matter  did form randomly, against all odds, there hasn't been enough geologic time for life with the biological and physical complexity of humans to have evolved through random mutations alone; (3) consciousness is so incomprehensible under a materialistic approach that a move beyond Darwinism is necessary.  Unlike creationists, however, Nagel doesn't come to a theistic conclusion—an Intelligent Designer—from these assertions.  As an atheist, he instead looks for a naturalistic addition to evolutionary theory.

  Nagel devotes most of his book to the problem of consciousness.  Materialists already have extensive neuroscientific evidence supporting their hope that consciousness will eventually be explained as activity of the brain cells—mind reduced to matter—but even they admit to currently being at a loss for a complete schema.  Nagel contends, as in his subtitle, that such a materialist monism is almost certainly a false trail.  He also dismisses both the dualism of Descartes, which almost entirely separates mind and matter; and the reductionism of such idealist philosophers as Bishop Berkeley, who advance a different sort of monism, that matter is reducible to mind, having no reality other than as a mental construction.  Nagel instead adheres to a philosophical concept called neutral monism—that the elementary stuff of which the universe is made is not purely physical or purely mental, but indivisibly both, neither reducing to the other.

  Nagel's case for neutral monism is intuitive, expressed in assertions like the following, which I have spliced together from several pages of one of his chapters: 

Organisms such as ourselves do not just happen to be conscious; therefore no explanation of the physical character of those organisms can be adequate which is not also an explanation of their mental character. … A naturalistic expansion of evolutionary theory to account for consciousness … would have to offer some account of why the appearance of conscious organisms, and not merely of behaviorally complex organisms, was likely. … It is not enough to say, "Something had to happen, so why not this?"  [Boldface is mine.]

I have boldfaced the word "likely" in this passage to emphasize Nagel's predicate of teleology: he calls for a naturalistic explanation in which evolution is systematically driven toward the development of conscious life rather than just life itself. 

  What could such a bias consist of?  Nagel discards panpsychism—that consciousness permeates the universe, making the evolution of conscious creatures likely.  He opts instead for emergent consciousness—that there are as yet undiscovered natural laws which, together with the laws of biology, chemistry and physics we already know, lead to consciousness in sufficiently complex organisms.

  Nagel offers no clue about what these additional laws might be, only asserting that they must exist in order to explain consciousness and such ancillary concepts as cognition and value-based behavior.  But how can one's skepticism not be stoked by the absence of any elaboration?  And, if his brand of neutral monism is truly neutral, driving evolution toward consciousness in tandem with physical complexity, why wouldn't some complex plants on Earth have developed signs of consciousness as well as many complex animals? Indeed, why does Nagel's teleology strike one as implausibly anthropocentric?

  Despite my skepticism, I am not so negative about Nagel's speculations as I was about the metaphysical pap I decried in Whence the Universe, where I discussed the book Why does the World Exist?  Much in that book consists of wild imaginings which seemed to me to have no gloss of rational thought.  Nagel, on the other hand, rationally postulates a missing element—unknown non-materialistic laws—to fill out our understanding of consciousness, and tries to thrash out the consequences of such a postulate.

  Yet this postulate smacks of others that have been introduced into science in attempts to accommodate the mysterious—for example, phlogiston to explain the release of heat from burning material and the luminiferous æther to explain how light could travel through a vacuum.  Scientists eventually discovered how to remove those intuitive but false suppositions.  Given Nagel's inability, other than through reference to his intuition, to adduce any evidence to support his neutral monism, materialist monists like myself will continue to expect and await an explanation of consciousness based solely on biology, chemistry and physics.

***

  Nagel's book neither changed my conception of the universe nor further illuminated David's for me.  More to the point, I think Nagel presumes on a bygone relationship of philosophy to science.  Many centuries ago, when science was still called "natural philosophy," the ruminations of philosophers about the nature of the universe still had an influence on science's development, if only—as do Nagel's—by raising more questions than they answered.  Since then, that influence has continually diminished, to the point where it is now pretty much nil.  Nagel's effort to turn back the clock is quixotic.

Philosophy, Schmilosophy!

  You've already been introduced to my son David, for I've linked to two of his songs elsewhere in this blog [1,2], and he wrote a guest posting praising the LSD-induced creativity of the 1950s-1960s Bay Area [3]. 

  Recently, David has seen several of his friends' fathers die.  More acutely aware of the inevitable, he has suddenly increased the frequency of his visits to me from London.  It's a gesture that has deeply touched me.  Still, I feel like any or all of the Jewish mothers in this venerable joke:

Mother 1:  "My son is an entrepreneur, starting companies left and right, but—bless him!—he writes to me every day!"

Mother 2:  "Huh!  My son runs a big multinational company, yet he finds the time to call me each day from all parts of the world!"

Mother 3:  "That's nothing!  My son, as busy as both of yours combined, spends an hour a day just talking to his doctor about me!"

(Joking aside, I should here also thank my architect daughter Abby, who calls me almost every evening—from all parts of the world!—to chat and wish me good night.)

  On his most recent trip to California a few weeks ago, David and I explored our very different views of the universe.  My universe is random at its core and is without any transcendental meaning.  His has a cosmic unity of which everything is a related part, so he sees the whole and his place in it as having an ethereal purpose.  Although neither of us is religious in the practicing sense, I think our contrasting world views roughly register the difference between two of the faces of the Jewish God that I earlier discussed: Elohim and Adonai.  The former, the Creator of the universe, lets it unfold in chaotic ways and cares not a fig for us mortals as we wend our way through His maelstrom.  The latter acts as an agent who transforms the chaos of creation into order and sanity, representing our striving to make sense of our existence.  I relate to Elohim; I believe that David would more likely cleave to Adonai.  Of course, since the central precept of Judaism is that God is One, a true believer must accept the whole of this Janus-like deity, a position I think neither of us can accept.

  Our differing viewpoints sometimes lead us to loggerheads.  David holds that I am denying a vital link to a spiritual mind-essence unifying all of creation.  (I believe philosophers would call him a panpsychist.)  I can't fathom this: I point to my head and insist, "What I am is only what's in here, no more, no less!"  On the other hand, he cannot understand my passive acquiescence in an underlying dominion of chance.  Since our universes are so different and each is so much a matter of metaphysical axiom, I often try to bring our discussion to a close by using Wittgenstein's admonition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."  I see no point in arguing about axioms.

  On a more mundane level, though, our disagreement is a study in irony.  I, believing in the suzerainty of disorder, have striven to establish localized order in my minute corner of the cosmos, an attempt I liken to the possible but vastly improbable spontaneous rushing of all air molecules into one corner of a room.  He, convinced that there is a oneness in all of existence, is unconcerned with random dislocations and anomalies, which he thinks will work themselves out as a matter of karma.  So here's the paradox: I try to construct a preternaturally orderly life in spite of universal turbulence, and he—who is unconcerned that life is buffeted by turbulence—calms his mind, almost as a Buddhist, with a sense of cosmic unity and peace.  Starting from such incompatible foundations, we seem to have arrived at similar places, each with its own sort of equanimity.

 

  Are our lives therefore that much different, given the polar philosophical axioms from which we start?  Except for a 35-year difference in age and therefore a generational difference in outlook, and very different financial statuses, I'd say "No."  We share the same concerns about inequity and iniquity in the world, the same worries about the environment, the same political outlook, the same moral code.  In a word, our vast difference about the grand question of the nature of the universe seems not to reflect itself all that much in how we conduct ourselves in it.  We should be on different channels altogether, but it seems we operate instead mostly on the same one. 

  Does that not say something about the value in everyday life of philosophical disputation?  The old New York Jew that I am wants to say, "Philosophy, schmilosophy!"