by Tom Kando
I just reread a classic: Thomas Nagel’s 1979 anthology Mortal Questions. This book consists of fourteen amazing articles by that author. Each raises a fundamental philosophical issue.
Nagel’s fourteen articles can be bunched into two major areas, plus a couple of other disparate topics:
1. Articles 11, 12, 13 and 14 are about the Mind and Consciousness.
2. Articles 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are about Morality, Ethics, Values and Judgment.
3. Article 1 is about Death and article 2 is about the Absurd.
Some may say that much of what Nagel (and all other philosophers) write(s) is just so much verbiage. That in the end, nothing they write makes any difference. Such an accusation applies to someone such as Nagel a fortiori, as his writing is extremely convoluted and esoteric, peppered with expressions such as Sub specie aeternitatis (meaning: “what is universally and eternally true"). But I have chosen to take this in stride, and to join his game. I enjoy it. Who knows, some of you may do so as well.
Nagel’s Preface: Labels and Philosophical Schools
Nagel is classified as belonging to the school of Analytic Philosophy. This is the dominant orientation in the Anglo world. Its adherents include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. It emphasizes language, as well as math and science. It is distinct from continental European orientations such as Existentialism and Phenomenology.
I first thought that Nagel might be labeled a “phenomenologist,” because his central preoccupation is Consciousness, which he describes as subjective experience. However, I was wrong. Phenomenology, founded by the German Edmund Husserl, is a method for the investigation of phenomena as consciously experienced. It is an epistemology, a theory of knowledge. Nagel’s quest is ontological and metaphysical: He asks questions about the fundamental nature of reality, for example the relationship between mind and matter.
He is not primarily focused on epistemology, the branch of philosophy which deals with knowledge. Examples of philosophers who are more concerned with the nature of knowledge include Karl Popper and his disciple David Deutsch. I describe some of these authors’ work in a few earlier posts. (See The Beginning of Infinity).
Until the middle of the 20th century, epistemology was dominated by Logical Positivism. This approach insisted on the importance of verification - through observation and logical proof. However, no philosophers subscribe to this any more. Nagel reminds us that logical/empirical positivism is dead.
Furthermore, he also loathes “Realism” (synonymous with “Pragmatism”) both in politics and in philosophy. These labels mean that your choice of problems and solutions is dictated not by the quest for truth but by what is feasible.
Nagel stresses that belief and the desire for answers are no reason to accept wrong answers. He reminds us of the need to be able to go on without clear answers: ”Some philosophical problems have no solutions” (p. XII). He also stresses the Importance of intuition and skepticism. The latter is defined as a questioning attitude combined with doubt, refusal to accept something which claims to be true but is asserted on the basis of belief or dogma and not fact or proof.
Furthermore, Nagel is a moral philosopher. As we’ll see, a majority of his articles are about ethical and moral questions
Above all, Nagel always stresses the importance of the subjective perspective in the age-old “subjectivity-objectivity” dichotomy. Regarding the major questions about the nature of reality, Nagel always remains unsatisfied with the all-encompassing physical reductionism and philosophical materialism which dominate our current search for knowledge and understanding. He rejects the notion that the mind and consciousness are fully reducible to chemistry and physics, as current neuroscience increasingly avers.
A caveat: Nagel’s arguments are not always easy to understand.
The Mind and Consciousness
I now pick up where I left off a few months ago in my review of Sam Harris’ book Making Sense. (See What is Mind, What is Consciousness).
Regarding the mind and consciousness, the trend for the past decades has been towards total reductionism and materialism. That is, the reduction of the mind and consciousness to nothing more than physics and chemistry. Neuroscience today reigns supreme, confident that it will discover everything there is to know about the mind and consciousness.
A good example of this dogmatism is Miles Raymer’s 2018 review of Nagel’s book: Raymer typifies today’s Zeitgeist: He is politically correct and eager to be in the vanguard of things. Thus, he (correctly) dismisses Nagel’s article about Sexual Perversion (#4) as dated - the only Nagel article, by the way, which I, too, find mediocre. However, in his effort to be fashionable, Raymer is wrong in writing off many of Nagel’s articles about consciousness and the mind-body problem as being obsolete.
He calls the article on Panpsychism (#13) “laughable today.” But such articles do not become obsolete just because they were written several decades ago, n’en depalise many young people’s widespread misconception that they do. Wiser people understand this. Sam Harris and others quote Nagel and recognize his continued relevance today. Nagel’s writings have the same timelessness as a book such as Viktor Frankl’s existentialist Man’s Search for Meaning, first published in 1946.
But Raymer prays at the altar of contemporary neuroscience. He misunderstands Nagel. He is a physical reductionist. He believes that consciousness and subjective/internal experience are illusions. He quotes the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky and A.I. pioneer Marvin Minsky, who once defined free will as “internal forces I do not understand.” He concludes that “what we call free will is a placeholder for our incomplete understanding of nature’s causal mechanisms.” (Miles Raymer).
Physical reductionists do not distinguish between the easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness.
However, according to philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, Annaka Harris and David Chalmers, the distinction is essential.
As Chalmers puts it (see my article What is Mind, What is Consciousness and Harris’ interview with Chalmers in Making Sense) “even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience — perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report — there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” (David Chalmers, Facing up to the hard problem of consciousness).
In other words, “the easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods” (Chalmers, ibid).
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia, or phenomenal experiences.
It is the problem of explaining why "there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject. (David Chalmers, ibid). Note that the italicized words used by Chalmers here are exactly those of Nagel, decades earlier.
That classic formulation by Nagel, first published in 1974, is reproduced as article #12 in the present volume - What is it like to be a Bat? This is the book’s most important article. It remains the basis for the non-reductionist understanding of the mind. Nagel’s famous definition: “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to BE that organism.” (p. 166)
However, physical reductionists such as Robert Sapolsky (see his interview in Making Sense) maintain that what philosophers call the “hard problem of consciousness” is simply what yet remains to be discovered by neuroscience. They use the following analogy: Hundred years ago, thinkers felt the same way about the “mystery of Life” as they do now about the “mystery of consciousness.” But today, physical science CAN explain life. It will be the same with consciousness, the mind and free will/agency.
Nagel, Chalmers and other scholars do not agree. They argue that without admitting the existence of the hard problem of consciousness, we will not understand the mind-body problem. To use the words of Annaka Harris: The question is: "how does experience arise out of non-sentient matter."(the hard problem of consciousness).
Or, again, Chalmers: “An (organism) is conscious if there is something it’s like to be that organism. There is something it’s like to be me. There is nothing it’s like to be this glass of water (Making Sense)”.
To which neuroscientist Anil Seth adds:: “...whereas for other entities, tables, chairs, probably all current computers, there is nothing-it-is-like -to-be that entity (Making Sense, p.101).
I like Seth’s inclusion of computers in his statement, We are currently very enamored with these machines. It brings up the topic of A.I. and the possibility of machines acquiring consciousness some day.
* * * * * * *
In article #11, Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness, Nagel reviews a great deal of the neuroscientific research on cerebral hemispheres.
He announces his agenda right off the bat: To debunk the biological reductionist view of mind.
Nagel defends the opposing conception of the mind, the “mentalist” one. He addresses the notion of two separate cerebral hemispheres with separate faculties. He reminds us that we, in fact, know ourselves to be a SINGLE unitary person. That is how we experience ourselves. Not as two separate halves.
He formulates and then debunks several hypotheses. One of these is that we have two separate minds (p. 158). Of course, the sense that I am a unitary mental person is also an illusion, as is the idea that I have ONE unitary self which directs my free will and my actions.
Ethan Rubin (2010) argues that Nagel is wrong in believing that the mind is a unified entity. However, Nagel’s position is NOT that the mind is ONE single countable entity. The problem of consciousness is more complex. That is why it is called “the hard problem.” The mind cannot be reduced to either ONE or TWO hunks of flesh. Without communication between the two hemispheres, you don’t have a mind. The mind is a process, and it may be part of something larger. Beyond this I cannot go.
Article #13 is titled Panpsychism. The previous paragraph leaves us in a lurch as far as the mind is concerned. One theory of which I am (remotely) reminded is the sociologist George Herbert Mead’s thesis that the mind is not an entity, but a process which emerges through social interaction.
Another notion is Panpsychism: The belief that mind/consciousness emerges from matter (p. 195), and is therefore inherent in all matter. This notion seems to have an affinity with some forms of Eastern spiritualism such as Buddhism.
Nagel analyses Panpsychism. He notes that a belief in Panpsychism requires a rejection of emergentism - the doctrine that a more complex system possesses properties which emerge at that level, and therefore cannot be reduced to or explained from the properties of the system’s component parts. For example, biology cannot be reduced to chemistry, psychology cannot be reduced biology, and sociology cannot be reduced to psychology. The properties of a group cannot be explained from the properties of the group’s individual members. New properties emerge at the group level. A system’s total is more than the sum of its component parts. Emergentism is the opposite of reductionism, and it is similar to philosophical realism, because it considers complex systems and their properties as real, and not derived from the properties of lower or simpler systems.
Nagel rejects emergentism. With regard to the mind and consciousness, emergentism would argue that consciousness emerges ex nihilo, for example with the onset of life. However, as we already saw, Nagel also rejects reductionism, and therefore Panpsychism. He emphasizes, again and again, that physical reductionism and objective neuroscience will never be able to explain mind/consciousness, which is a subjective experience: “Physical brain processes can be understood objectively. But no description or analysis of the objective nervous system can be understood from the viewpoint of the being whose states are being described” (the subjective point of view). “One cannot derive a pour soi from an en soi” p. 188).
For now, we have no explanation for mind and consciousness.
The final chapter of the Nagel anthology is article #14 - Subjective and Objective. Here, Nagel once again focuses on the shortcomings of positivist science. He points out that most of us tend to equate “objective” with “real” and “subjective” with
“illusion.” We feel that true scientific knowledge consists of facts which have been verified objectively.
However, Nagel reminds us, again, that experience is subjective. The mind-body problem arises from the subjective character of experience (p. 201): “What seems to be impossible is to include in a physical conception of the world (and of the mind) the facts about what mental states are like for the creature having them...The subjective aspects of the mental can be apprehended only from the point of view of the creature itself” (p. 201).
In my next posts, I will cover the following topics: (1) Morality, Ethics, Justice, Inequality, Affirmative Action; (2) Death and the Absurd and (3) Are Free Will and Agency Illusions?
© Tom Kando 2021;All Rights Reserved
