Mind and cosmos
by Thomas Nagel · first published 2012
30% recommend40% neutral30% critical
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
Related books
2011–2026The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Ted Chiang
Recommended by 33 · mentioned by 5433 recommend · 54 mention33 recommend · 5433 recommend
2007–2026The Mind's I
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett
Recommended by 36 · mentioned by 5736 recommend · 57 mention36 recommend · 5736 recommend
Permutation City
Greg Egan
Recommended by 256 · mentioned by 354256 recommend · 354 mention256 recommend · 354256 recommend
2007–2026I Am a Strange Loop
Douglas R. Hofstadter
Recommended by 101 · mentioned by 204101 recommend · 204 mention101 recommend · 204101 recommend
…Whence consciousness? 3) How can something come from nothing? There is a great deal of evidence that materialism is not the best explanation for Reality. If you want to see some of this evidence, read "Mind and Cosmos" by Thomas Nagel.
on “The Egg” ↗…revolution, this limitation of science was, however, more generally and explicitly acknowledged than it is today, where there seems to be a lot of confusion about it. A good book on this stuff is Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. I do agree that the terminology is unfortunately convoluted. The main term is “consciousness,” which does often seem unclear to me. The basic mystery is just the ability to experience/feel, and is…
on “Google fires engineer who called its AI sentient” ↗…a wiki or forum. But you can read some books that begin to introduce these ideas. On the topic of consciousness, less academic and more slated towards general audience: Reality+ by David Chalmers and Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel and Galileo's Error by Phillip Goff will give you and interesting gamut of ideas. The thing about arguments in philosophy is that they span from a very old web of thought that has been…
on “No, Artificial Intelligence is not Conscious - Ted Chiang” ↗…couldn't do semantics either, but they do!) If this wasn't enough, Nagel (of "What is it like to be a bat?" fame) has shown that the materialistic hypothesis is almost certainly wrong, in his recent book "Mind and Cosmos". http://www.Amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-... But the world pays no attention to Nagel either. To do so would be to have a Kuhnian revolution of epic proportions, and that is not…
on “MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award” ↗…epiphenomenal. How do intentions affect the physical world as seems to be happening when our minds move our bodies? What is the solution, here, to the mind-body problem? I just finished reading Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" which highlights some of the salient issues with reductionist explanations of consciousness, cognition, and value. I don't think these things are just a state of matter. http://www.amazon.ca/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-C...
on “Consciousness as a State of Matter” ↗I've been reading Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" recently, and while I think it's actually a really terrible book and Nagel is incredibly uninformed on the theory of evolution, I do think he makes one really good point: the scientific method presupposes…
on “Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds” ↗I feel a lot of times that many modern philosophers simply not qualified enough in natural sciences. I've read Mind & Cosmos but gave up halfway: Nagel simply does not get evolution. Contemporary philosophical discussion many times is like typical forum debates on the Internet about basic science - someone says something stupid and the others try to educate him, he don't get it and write his sam
on “Derek Parfit has died” ↗Reviews of Nagel's book by actual philosophers: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/mind-and-cosmos-why-the-material... https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/do-you-only-have-b... https://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/remarkable-facts
on “Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real (2013)” ↗…bat?'. This subjectivity seems absent in the science of enlightenment thinkers who were driven to find the 'objective' laws of nature. Nagel wrote a controversial book towards the end of his life called 'Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False' where he argues that this very subjectivity cannot be fit into any current materialist theory. I tend to agree with this…
on “Can AI Become Conscious?” ↗…the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day.” This seems to us perhaps the most startling sentence in all of Mind and Cosmos. Nagel doesn't seem to give science credit where credit is due. I find Daniel Dennett a much more interesting read because he actually wrestles with the philosophical implications of the scientific…
on “Thomas Nagel: Thoughts Are Real (2013)” ↗I wonder why NYU Professor of Philosophy Thomas Nagels 2012 book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False" until this point hasn't been mentioned in this thread? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_and_Cosmos https://books.google.de/books?id=pOzNcdmhjIYC&printsec=front...
on “Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)” ↗