(Murray, 2024)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Cronin-Walker Assembly Theory and the Anti-Reductionist Turn
3. Physics is Not Causally Closed: Nicolas Gisin’s Anti-Mechanism
4. Barbara Drossel’s Anti-Reductionism
5. Donald Hoffman’s Case Against Reality: There are No Brains
7. Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: A Defense of Teleological Naturalism and a Critique of Materialist Reductionism
8. Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents: A Biological Case Against Mechanistic Determinism
9. Conclusion
The essay below will be published in six installments; this, the fifth, contains section 7.
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7. Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: A Defense of Teleological Naturalism and a Critique of Materialist Reductionism
Thomas Nagel’s 2012 book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Nagel, 2012), represents a significant challenge to orthodox scientific materialism in contemporary philosophy. While Nagel’s work has faced extensive criticism from the scientific establishment, our analysis here maintains that his core insights about the explanatory inadequacies of materialist approaches to consciousness, cognition, and objective reason remain philosophically compelling and point toward necessary revisions in our understanding of nature’s fundamental character, and the rejection of mechanism.
Nagel argues that the natural and social sciences are unable to account for the existence of mind and consciousness of man and that mind is a basic aspect of nature and that any philosophy of nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally misguided.
The Failure of Materialist Reductionism
The Consciousness Problem
Nagel’s critique begins with what he sees as the most obvious failure of materialist approaches: their inability to account for conscious experience. The modern materialist approach to life has arguably failed to explain consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value.
This failure is not merely a gap in current knowledge that future scientific progress will inevitably fill. Rather, Nagel argues, it represents a fundamental conceptual problem with materialist approaches. For Nagel, conscious experience has first-person-perspectival qualities that resist assimilation to the third-person perspective and metrics of physics. The “explanatory gap” between neural processes and subjective experience, from a materialist perspective, may be unbridgeable.
Supporting Evidence for the Consciousness Problem
The persistence of the “hard problem of consciousness” despite decades of neuroscientific progress supports Nagel’s assessment. While we have learned enormous amounts about neural correlates of consciousness, we remain as mystified as ever about how objective physical processes could give rise to subjective experience. Current approaches, from Global Workspace Theory to Integrated Information Theory succeed in correlating neural activity with conscious states, but fail to explain why there should be any subjective dimension to these processes at all.
Furthermore, the recent recognition that consciousness research faces fundamental methodological problems, including the “no-report paradigm” problem and the difficulty of establishing causal rather than merely correlational relationships, suggests that the challenges run deeper than initially recognized.
The Problem of Intentionality and Mental Causation
Beyond consciousness, Nagel identifies intentionality, the mind’s capacity to be about or directed toward objects, as another phenomenon that resists materialist explanation. Mental states possess semantic properties and logical relationships that appear fundamentally different from the causal relationships that characterize physical processes.
The problem becomes particularly acute when considering mental causation. If thoughts and beliefs are really just patterns of neural activity, how can they have genuine causal power qua mental states? The standard materialist responses—eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, or various forms of reductionism—all seem to deny the reality of mental causation in ways that conflict with our most basic understanding of rational agency.
The Challenge of Objective Reason
Perhaps most significantly, Nagel argues that materialist naturalism cannot account for the objectivity of reason itself. Our capacity to recognize logical relationships, mathematical truths, and evidential connections appears to involve something more than merely tracking biological fitness. Yet if our rational capacities are purely the result of natural selection operating on random mutations, why should we trust them to deliver objective truth rather than merely adaptive beliefs?
This creates what Nagel calls the “evolutionary argument against naturalism”: if naturalism is true, then our belief-forming faculties are likely unreliable for discovering truth (as opposed to survival-relevant information), which undermines our reasons for believing naturalism in the first place.
The Inadequacy of Neo-Darwinian Explanations
Beyond Fitness Optimization
To suggest that so hugely significant a phenomenon as life and the mind can be explained, as Darwinians claim, by mere accident, the exploitation of random genetic mutations by natural selection, strikes him as an absurdity. This reaction, far from being anti-scientific prejudice, reflects genuine philosophical problems with neo-Darwinian approaches to explaining the origins of consciousness and rational cognition, that one us discussed over 40 years ago (Smith, 1984).
Natural selection is a powerful mechanism for explaining adaptive complexity, but it faces several challenges when extended to account for consciousness and objective reason, as follows.
The Problem of Emergent Complexity
While natural selection can explain incremental improvements in existing capacities, it struggles to explain the emergence of qualitatively new properties like consciousness. The standard response, that consciousness emerges from neural complexity, merely restates the problem rather than solving it. Why should any amount of neural complexity produce subjective experience rather than merely sophisticated information processing?
The Cognitive Reliability Problem
If our cognitive faculties evolved primarily for survival and reproduction rather than truth-tracking, this raises serious questions about their reliability when applied to abstract domains like mathematics, logic, and theoretical science. The fact that these faculties seem remarkably effective in such domains suggests that something beyond mere fitness optimization may be involved.
The Value Problem
Perhaps most puzzling for neo-Darwinian approaches is the existence of objective values and moral truths. While evolutionary approaches can explain the development of moral emotions and prosocial behaviors, they struggle to account for the objectivity of moral judgment, our sense that certain actions are right or wrong independent of their contribution to fitness.
The Case for Teleological Naturalism
Natural Teleology Without Intelligence
Nagel’s positive proposal involves what he calls “teleological naturalism,” the view that natural processes are inherently directed toward the development of consciousness and rational cognition. He argues that the principles that account for the emergence of life may be teleological, rather than materialist or mechanistic.
Crucially, this is not intelligent design in disguise. Despite Nagel’s being an atheist and not a proponent of intelligent design (ID), he proposes that natural teleology operates through immanent principles rather than external design. He does not reject our common ancestry, he doesn’t deny the power of natural selection, and he doesn’t support the theological doctrine of ID.
Precedents in Science and Philosophy
The idea of natural teleology is not as radical as critics suggest. Consider several precedents, as follows.
Physics and Final Causes
Modern physics already employs teleological principles in various forms. The principle of least action, which governs fundamental physical processes, can be understood as a form of natural teleology. Physical systems behave as if they are “aiming” toward configurations that minimize action, even though no conscious purpose is involved.
Self-Organization and Emergence
Contemporary science increasingly recognizes self-organizing processes that produce complex, ordered structures without external guidance. From crystal formation to biological morphogenesis, nature exhibits inherent tendencies toward organization and complexity that cannot be reduced to purely mechanical processes.
Information and Meaning
The central role of information in both physics and biology suggests that nature has semantic as well as causal properties. DNA carries meaningful information, quantum mechanics involves observer effects, and biological systems process and respond to semantic content. These phenomena point toward a deeper connection between mind and nature than strict materialism allows.
The Psychophysical Nexus Laws
Nagel proposes that consciousness and rational cognition emerge through what he calls “psychophysical nexus laws,” fundamental laws of nature that connect physical and mental properties. These laws would be as basic as the laws of physics but would govern the emergence of conscious states from physical processes.
This proposal has several advantages, as follows.
Naturalistic: It remains within a naturalistic framework while expanding our conception of what nature includes.
Explanatory: It provides a principled account of mind-body emergence rather than treating it as a brute fact.
Predictive: Such laws could potentially make testable predictions about the conditions under which consciousness emerges.
Unified: It suggests a deeper unity between mind and nature than dualistic approaches allow.
Responses to Standard Criticisms
The “God of the Gaps” Objection
Critics often dismiss Nagel’s arguments as merely pointing to current gaps in scientific knowledge that future research will inevitably fill. This criticism misses the depth of Nagel’s philosophical challenge. He is not arguing that consciousness is mysterious because we don’t yet understand it scientifically, but rather that consciousness poses conceptual problems that cannot be resolved within a materialist framework, regardless of empirical progress.
The persistence of these conceptual problems despite enormous empirical progress in neuroscience supports Nagel’s diagnosis. We have learned vast amounts about neural correlates of consciousness, but we remain as conceptually puzzled as ever about why there should be any subjective dimension to these processes.
The Argument from Scientific Success
Another common criticism points to the enormous success of materialist science in explaining natural phenomena. Why should we abandon such a successful approach based on philosophical concerns about consciousness?
Nagel’s response is that scientific success in some domains does not automatically extend to all domains. Classical physics was enormously successful within its domain, but required fundamental revision in order to accommodate quantum and relativistic phenomena. Similarly, materialist approaches may be successful for many purposes, while requiring fundamental modification in order to accommodate consciousness and rational cognition.
The Lack of Alternative Theory
Critics often point out that Nagel provides no detailed alternative to materialist approaches, merely criticizing existing views without offering a worked-out replacement theory. Of course, Nagel has no such theory, which he cheerfully admits. That’s for the scientists to come up with! He’s just a philosopher, he says.
This criticism misunderstands the role of philosophical critique. His point is rather to argue that a future physics may well differ as much from today’s physics as today’s does from Aristotle’s, which is to say as much as science differs from natural history or philosophy from religion. Philosophical analysis can identify fundamental problems with existing approaches and point toward necessary directions for revision without providing detailed scientific theories.
The history of science supports this view. Many scientific revolutions were preceded by philosophical critiques that identified conceptual problems with existing approaches before alternative theories were fully developed. Nagel’s contribution lies in clarifying why materialist approaches face fundamental rather than merely technical problems.
The Question of Scientific Orthodoxy
Challenging Established Paradigms
Nagel is right to doubt science’s ability to explain everything. The vehemence of criticism directed at Nagel’s book is itself significant. When established paradigms face fundamental challenges, the initial response is typically defensive rather than genuinely evaluative.
The history of science shows that major conceptual revolutions typically face initial resistance from established orthodoxy. This does not mean that all challenges to orthodoxy are correct, but it suggests that the mere fact of widespread criticism cannot be taken as decisive evidence against Nagel’s arguments.
Science excels within its proper domain, the investigation of objective, mechaical, quantifiable phenomena through empirical methods. However, questions about the fundamental nature of reality, the relationship between mind and matter, and the scope of scientific explanation involve philosophical considerations that cannot be resolved purely through empirical investigation.
Nagel’s critique operates at this philosophical level, questioning the conceptual foundations of materialist approaches rather than disputing specific empirical claims.
If Nagel’s arguments are sound, consciousness research needs fundamental reorientation. Rather than attempting to reduce consciousness to neural processes, researchers should investigate psychophysical connection principles that might govern the emergence of conscious states from physical processes. This might involve:
- Investigation of information integration principles that could connect physical and mental properties.
- Research into the conditions under which consciousness emerges in natural and artificial systems.
- Development of mathematical frameworks that can accommodate both physical and phenomenal properties.
- Exploration of the relationship between consciousness and fundamental physical processes.
Science moving in this direction would therefore be totally different from the reductionism presupposed by contemporary physicalism and mechanism.
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