Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously shook up the philosophy of mind with his seminal article, “What is It Like to be a Bat?” He begins with the premise that “reduction euphoria,” which aims to explain consciousness by “some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction” gets it “obviously wrong,” and he states upfront and repeats at the conclusion, “we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be” (Nagel, 1974).

Consciousness and the Limits of Physicalism

Nagel's essay focuses on the nature of subjective experience, which could differ widely among different sentient creatures (hence the “bat” of the title). His point is that “It is like something” to have a conscious experience; it is not like nothing. It is perhaps Nagel's footnote on the phrase that has had the most lasting impact: “Therefore the analogical form of the English expression "what it is like" is misleading. It does not mean "what (in our experience) it resembles," but rather "how it is for the subject himself” (Nagel, 1974).

Nagel does not conclude that physicalism with respect to consciousness is false. “Nothing is proved by the inadequacy of physicalist hypotheses that assume a faulty objective analysis of mind. It would be truer to say that physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true” (Nagel, 1974).

Thirty-eight years later, Nagel published the controversial Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, and he goes further: “The failure of reductionism in the philosophy of mind has implications that extend beyond the mind-body problem. Psychophysical reductionism is an essential component of a broader naturalistic program, which cannot survive without it” (Nagel, 2012). Thus, Nagel rejects wholly physicalist/materialist explanations, not only for consciousness but also for all reality!

Beyond Theism and Materialism

Nagel is no theist. (“It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that” [Nagel, 1997].) As a comprehensive worldview, he does not find theism any more credible than materialism. His interest is “in the territory between them.” He asserts that “these two radically opposed conceptions of ultimate intelligibility cannot exhaust the possibilities. All explanations come to an end somewhere. Both theism and materialism say that at the ultimate level, there is one form of understanding. But would an alternative secular conception be possible that acknowledged mind and all that it implies, not as the expression of divine intention but as a fundamental principle of nature along with physical law?” (Nagel, 2012).

As a result, Nagel finds himself moving to a universal monism or panpsychism. “If we imagine an explanation taking the form of an enlarged version of the natural order, with complex local phenomena formed by composition from universally available basic elements, it will depend on some kind of monism or panpsychism, rather than laws of psychophysical emergence that come into operation only late in the game” (Nagel, 2012).

Earlier, he had argued that panpsychism would follow from four premises: 1) All is material; there is no spiritual existence, no disembodied souls. 2) Consciousness is not wholly reducible to physical properties. 3) Consciousness is real; mental states exist. 4) Strong emergence is not possible; all higher-order properties of matter can be derived from the properties of its lower-order constituents (Nagel, 1979).

Yet, I choose to classify Nagel under “Challenge Theories,” not under Panpsychism or Monism, because he is more passionate to explicate the profundity of the problem than to promote even his kind of solution.