Mind and Cosmos by Nagel

Commentary, Part One, involving geological time, molecular clocks, origin, Mind, and Berkeley

Mind and Cosmos, Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel, Oxford U Press, 2012

PART ONE

Nagel

Nagel - We must develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt. Intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to say we have a final reckoning... We need to recognize what can and cannot in principle be understood by certain existing methods. There is a comprehensive, speculative world picture reached by extrapolation from biology, chemistry, and physics that postulates a hierarchal relationship among subjects of those sciences and explains all through their unification. Most scientists practice science without a concern for cosmological questions that this materialistic reductionism answers. The more the details about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code is known then the more the standard historical account becomes untenable.

Exactly, see Kimura and his neutral theory of molecular evolution, and note Darwin's evolution is an historical anachronism and that natural selection is a macro phenomenon and breaks down at a micro (genetic) level. But once Mendel got into it, the reductionist itch became too great. Besides, "evolution" has become vacuous or baggy having the meaning of "change", any change at all. The greatest opposition to Darwin's notions was involved in the lack of allowance for change. Some people of that era wanted that God's creatures were, are, and will be as He intended. Therefore, acceptance of change in life forms, as species, was a big advance by biologists.

Nagel says it is highly implausible that life is a result of a sequence of physical accident and the mechanism of natural selection. It could be accidents, as seen from our perspective, but certainly the mechanism and all of science is mechanistic in that it left humanity at Galileo’s station from Day One, and traveled on to natural selection, an interesting idea, but not tested under Darwin's conditions unless very recently done and in controlled environments.

Nagel makes use of the available geologic time. Geological time is based not on biology (obviously) but since no biological clock is available, we use the geological one, the only biological clock pertinent to evolution and natural selection is the molecular clock of evolution. This molecular clock is based on rates of some molecules of evolutionary significance, not any other molecules and by itself it can only say if one time period is twice as long as another. There is a need to calibrate it with fossils. Then one gets concrete dates. The fossils are dated geologically. Ayala (1999) said the molecular clock can be confounded so as to have a limited application of the molecular clock. But workarounds sling at you "maximum likelihood" techniques and Bayesian modelling to get it done. Even so, divergence dates are inferred from a molecular clock statistically and not on direct evidence. The molecular clock flounders in very short and very long times. As Nagel states, one is dealing in highly specific events over enormous amounts of time for which the available evidence is very indirect.

Nagel notes that the advances in the physical and biological sciences are made possible by excluding mind. I know what he means but actually "mind" is present in all the physical and biological sciences. They wanted a quantitative understanding. It was decided that the mind would be used in a certain way in order to further science. Nagel thinks Mind is recent. How can he know this? For Nagel there is much before minds. This is a dangerous assertion and errors grow large. The minds read back into these events their presence, assuming the minds were already there. Darwin and others had guessed at what now looks like an excruciatingly slow gradualism to account for All. Still others see that it could not have been that slow so punctuated evolution and mutations ad nauseam are called on to get past such errors.

Nagel : Natural selection is inadequate for the origin of life.

Actually, "origin" is inaccessible via science in all forms. This isn't a proper topic to be introduced into a discussion about Darwin, his successors, evolution, and natural selection. It is unfair since "natural selection" as of science cannot be linked to considerations of "origin". Given that the origin is given up by them, they still deny our uniqueness whereas it is our uniqueness that accounts for mathematics, science, and "evidence" that we are not unique.

Nagel's focus should be on what is biological time (those millions and millions of years granted gratis to them) and the fact(s) about what is involuntary in our lives. Evolution and natural selection have become "history" but without clocks, except for an inadequate molecular clock. The fossils, derived from geological time, not biological time, as evidence for natural selection, are like glimpsing only a stop action of a second hand sweep of an otherwise unseen clock, a mechanical clock, not one supporting intelligent design.

Nagel : If our mental nature is not reducible to the physical, then meaning and value are gone.

I don't know about value, but why must Mind be reducible to the physical? Certainly Mind is based on the physical, but it need not be reducible to it and does not thereby lose "meaning". The mind, for itself, ourselves, determines meaning, and meaning may be apart from the physical. Evolution, Darwin’s or the synthesis or the otherwise latest version, can't account for consciousness. It is consciousness that "determines" evolution in that evolution is not existent except for consciousness. Actually, I don't accept the tripartite mind, consciousness, self-consciousness. All living things to varying degrees are conscious, and to extremely varying degrees all other things are conscious, including the atomic buzz, but few are self-conscious and only one has Mind.

Nagel: Mind is related to the natural order.

Yes it can be so related, though Mind need not be so related, what Mind is or has, is what is. If what is, is other than supposed, then Mind will be of that, whatever that is. He implies we can think without Mind. Nagel : Nature gives rise to conscious beings. No, not with Mind tacked on, nature itself is of Mind. Not nature, then Mind. Mind isn't "natural”. If it was, then why all these problems?

Nagel : Could the mind provide the fundamental level of explanation?

It already does, though this entails persistent uncertainty á al Keats, which is as good as it gets. Accept an explanation (God) and the attendant persistent uncertainty (overcome by faith) or the Great Quantum Hope must be enacted if Science must get at Explanation on its terms once and for all. That is, the scientific explanation lies at the quantum level and good luck with that and don't be too sure there isn't another level "underneath" the quantum world. The persistent uncertainty and God lie in the involuntary.

At the true startup of science, Nagel finds there was a need to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind as well as human purposes and intentions in order to get on with a quantitative description in space and time for shape, size, and motion. Actually, in the larger sense, what they chose to work with was also "subjective"; you cannot get outside of yourself and then machine-like set up experiments. What experiments to do and when and how they are interpreted are highly subjective. Of course, the human mind wasn't left out. Even the purposes and intentions were not gone. It is still subjective, with what purposes support mathematics and its use for space and time and shape, size, and motion.

Nagel : We are physical and composed of some parts segregated from us.

We are not summed by our physicality. We have a physical component in all cases involuntary but with non-physical components such as memory and thought, also involuntary. Only in the non-physical are we not wholly determined. In this there is a great significance.

Nagel: Evolutionary theory from the outset should have provided for the mind, and consciousness.

However, they are not subject to natural selection. They are not inherited. Only part of us is genetically determined and might have been evolutionary in Darwin's sense. We know this, we have found this out about ourselves, but many among us deny it.

To get to the mind, Nagel thinks the physical theory (Darwinianism) needs or needed an ahistorical component. It is ahistorical. As for Mind we can accept, allow for history or ignore it, as we choose. If historical, how "far back" is Mind? Is Mind then in the fossil sense going back Denisovan-like for maybe 400,000 years? What mind communicates to us from 400,000 years ago? The key is that we have no memory of it, them. Our memory begins and ends with each of us. If we do not record the memory, we do not know it. Why write to document if it was not going to be preserved? There is a density of population at work here to sustain writing. Or were hand signals used? When came language? What need of language if the very low population density had no need of it? No cities, no civilization until a population density could support them. No one now remembers the dinosaurs any more than they remember the Civil War.

Nagel: He thinks teleology has a place. There are changes over time tending to certain types of outcomes.

Certainly, among those outcomes one has Mindless teleology, tending to the Bomb, accelerated global warming, no morals, rampant boredom, no God and so on. If there has been natural selection, if evolution, why no consciousness, no Mind longer ago? Why so very recent geologically speaking? Natural selection had to be thought of, so why so late, geologically speaking? Why not think it All, all at once?

Berkeley

Berkeley said that the world, our world, not one of bats (á la Nagel) is the one we can understand. If it were to be beyond Mind, then what of it could we discuss? If it is of practicability and of Mind then it is practicable but if it is of Mind divorced from the world, then it is of Mind, exclusively. It is how we choose to relate, after an historical period, when we "come of age" mentally to the world that determines our individual reality, fantasy or no consideration of either or of others. If we enter into it, consensus must be dealt with and to rant against it is stupid. The "artists" must be left to their "creativity" and we must accept it or supposedly we don't know art.

Berkeley had only minds and their ideas. The involuntary are not of Mind. Maybe he made the involuntary to be of ideas. He found created minds or uncreated ones so I suppose we are created (involuntary) while God is the only uncreated one. He need not create Himself. Only God gets ideas from zero. We work from what is real or existent, we combine ideas or bring in data. What is new to a mind was not always new to another mind, this what is new could be ideas or data. But for evolution or natural selection, it, whatever, was new, a combination of something preexisting or not preexisting such as mutation. Evolution and natural selection (E-NS) are typically about structures, not a process, which is the territory of Mind. It is said the structure takes much geological time but Mind can be much faster than that.

Berkeley said all change is by the mind. E-NS seems to contradict this. But Berkeley was dealing in process, thought. E-NS is of structure. One can see change in structure (fossils) but not, usually, in process, of thought. Only speaking or writing give an indication, usually imprecise, about thought.

Berkeley would not accept material objects and non-material minds. Apparently, Berkeley wanted it all to be of the mind, it was not of consequence if it was material or not though I suppose it all came down to being non-material since Berkeley thought matter was a philosophical fiction. Mechanical causation is impossible. Minds are the only activity. God supports us, minutely. He must, because once there is a lack of Mind, there is no realm and no other choice unless hopelessness, waste, a shrug for "what is" be your guide.

Berkeley thought time was a succession of ideas. It is a succession of memory for you and I, for all of us it is an abstraction, a consensus process. It has no structure. Since it is a succession, it must then be determinative of "space", to give one space, so to speak, but more so to have space, not to be in space; space is not a container, independent of us. Because of this succession, we say how “long” is time. Thoughts are successive only in us, how do we get a space and time outside of us, or are they outside? Aren't there Others, with their minds? Could one say space and time are involuntary?

Is evolution involuntary? Is natural selection involuntary? No, consider Kimura. It isn't fixed, there is a freedom. There is no freedom in the involuntary. Species become extinct, the fixation of species is what some Christians wished to maintain in opposition to Darwin. But evolution and natural selection "carry with them" the involuntary so the truth of E-NS and Darwin is false.

Ayers in a commentary about Berkeley wrote that Locke thought, contrary to Descartes, that the essence of Spirit or Mind is not consciousness or thought itself, but is something unknown to us. We are aware we think and have experiences but we have no direct conception of the underlying processes of thought or of the nature of that which thinks. The best we can do is minute particles and the void.

I would add that Mind is not summed by consciousness nor can thought get to the bottom of itself, its thoughts, since one can think of thought thinking of thought....yet we do not arrive at infinite regress, there is a block. Today the physicists think we are, or it is, particles and fields, no void (not a vacuum in any case). There can be no something from nothing for us, not known to us, but unknown to us, namely we were nothing before birth, no not sperm and egg and indirectly in mom and pop or test tube but simply nothing, no forerunner, precursor, etc. E-NS has no workable origin, it, on its terms, could not be from nothing. Nothing obviously has no structure. But something from nothing is a process. Not "time" nor "space" is necessary.

Berkeley denied physical causality; he wanted natural science subordinated to theology and ethics. For Berkeley, analogy is the essence of natural explanation. Ayers said it all comes down to probability, and as an escape it is wrong since probability is a purported explanation that presupposes intelligibility with regard to numbers. This is not beyond objects or structure.

According to Ayers, Hume said universal causality must be based on induction. Induction is vital to E-NS, but Berkeley held that induction depends on a metaphysical supposition that the Author of Nature always operates uniformly. Not all of us, those of us closer to the animal state, can eat, drink, make merry and die without "laws", regularity, or uniformity, taking the lesser (in human terms, since "meaning" is of no concern like if the daughter dies, or the partner is tortured or your friends harm you, then that is "life" and crapola happens and c'est la vie and so on) route while here.

Do we know there are other minds or do we suppose so, believe so, or hope so? I think of them, I don’t know them and cannot know them. I cannot think for them nor them for me (though politically, religiously, socially this has and is being attempted) and only God and not Berkeley, Hume, Nagel or Ayers can do that. Without God (or other agency, and what, pray tell, would that be - a super robot, super thinking thing like a supercomputer, an alien?) for the imagination and anything else "intelligible" or otherwise, it is an impossibility or should we make it highly improbable, a shifting of the numbers, or let it be, make merry, die?