A Critical Analysis Of Thomas Nagel's Mind And Cosmos

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In Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that physical sciences cannot provide a full picture of life. A few of his arguments are that consciousness is naturally assigned to the brain, [Nagel 35] materialist arguments denying the mind means that the premise is false, [Nagel 15] and lastly, high cognitive functioning such as thinking can only be performed by beings that have a mind. [Nagel 73] When it comes to the consciousness being assigned to the brain, Nagel states “Subjective appearances, on the other hand- how this physical world appears to human perception- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers.” (Nagel 35) What he means when he says this, is that the way we see the world isn’t objective; another being could see the world in a completely different way. The …show more content…

[Nagel 71] He also states that their existence cannot be explained by a physically reductive evolutionary theory. Nagel stated “Even in the wild, it isn’t just perception and operant conditioning that have survival value. The capacity to generalize from experience and allow these generalizations, or general expectations, to be confirmed or disconfirmed by subsequent experience is also adaptive. [Nagel 71] His argument can be summed up by saying that natural selection would favor creatures that have higher-level cognition. In addition to this, higher-level cognition warrants the need for a mind. While this sounds good, it doesn’t prove that high-level cognition causes or requires consciousness. It still leaves the possibility open for life to operate, just without an operator, perhaps similar to a computer that can be programmed to loop a task and still be operating without the

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