{{ Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real }} {{ Nagel... asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray. In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them. }} This doesnt make it impossible that levels of organization, for example in grammar and syntax with the hierarchy of letters, words, sentences, chapters, etc... could each be considered as an irreducible dimension. Take a sentence apart and you have only words, the dimension of sentences is irreducible and necessarily disappears when the sentence is broken into individual words. {{ His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. }} If mental things are irreducible processes in a hierarchy of levels of organization, each level having its own rules, it is not unreasonable to suppose that some basic levels could evolve and then more levels could be added to them over deep evolutionary time. {{ subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology—the concept of evolution—can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. }} There is a difference between something being reducible or not below its functional level of organization and something consisting of components changing relationships over time. If the former is true it doesnt rule out the latter, that the process is the changing relationship of components. {{ But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it—“an irreducible faculty.” He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” }} The evolutoon of the eye from a flat peice of light sensitive skin, lens and all, is a good example of why Nagel is probably wrong above with his idea something like that complexity cannot be layered on top of more simple components. https://youtube/watch?v=h5M8fXCyQ94 {{ And this, he argues, would be a theory of teleology—a preprogrammed or built-in tendency in the universe toward the particular goal of fulfilling the possibilities of mentality. }} The theory of natural selection describes a process wherby organisms are designed by the the demands of their environment. If he thinks natural selection is teleological he is probably wrong, since those that deal with the environment better have a reproductive advantage over others. This designs the organism in a blind way to function well in that environment. {{ In effect, the universe tends toward maximizing certain goals and places }} Actually after the competitors are dead what is left alive only appears to have tended towards some complex design. The ones with the molecular configurations that somehow appear to be designed are just the only ones that made it to that point stil beimg alive. {{ Nagel’s ...argument implies that consciousness - indeed, mental life, whether conscious or not—is not atomic but holistic: there is no such thing as a piece or an atom of experience, but, rather, a mind at a given moment is flooded with an incalculable number of perceptions, memories, ideas, judgments, and desires. }} Not necessarily since, as with grammar and syntax, each level of organization has its own rules and each is irreducible to the lower levels. A part of a sentence can never be the sentence and a part of the word can never be the word. They are still atomic or consist of components. {{ Even enumerating them in the plural is a little silly, because it implies the ability to isolate them as singular events or things. }} Not necessarily since we can enumerate the elements and levels of organization of a sentence, consisting or words and letters, without considering those seperate elements as being the entire sentence. {{ Therefore, philosophy, in order to account for mental life, will need to turn aside from isolated experiments in logic and argumentation in favor of rough-edged, life-sized chunks—historical events and figures, works of art, artists themselves, cities, countries, languages, human dramas of all sorts, lived or imagined. }} Thats like saying that a linguist talking about an entire book can never discuss any words or sentences in the book else it would be false? I am beginning to notice this new trend in Creationism Envy where athiests want some of those context hiding arument styles too!
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 17:03:36 +0000
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