Nagel's Mind and Cosmos

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Nagel's Mind and Cosmos

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1steve.clason
Ott 30, 2012, 3:39 pm

Thomas Nagel has raised a ruckus with Mind and Cosmos, arguing (they say) that materialistic reductionism is just plain false. Can anyone who's read the book comment?

2PedrBran
Nov 19, 2012, 11:09 pm

I wrote a review of it. He doesn't claim that materialistic reductionism is plain false exactly, he says that it is incomplete. He holds to an obscure position known as pan-psychism, or that all material things have a mental component. This is an additional force that would be added to an expanded physics. However, how this force is detected is not explained.

He also holds that the universe is teleological. Humans and value are somehow the goal of evolution. But once again, he doesn't know how this works or could be detected. He drifts back and forth between claiming that he is just engaged in a thought experiment, ie lets assume that evolutionary theory is incomplete, what would that mean, and claiming that evolutionary theory is false in the sense of incomplete.

If he would have explicitly stated that what he is doing is a thought experiment and consistently stuck to that line of argument, without claiming the evolutionary theory is false, the book would have been stronger.

3carusmm
Mag 19, 2016, 5:19 am

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