The Universe Was Made for Mind - Thomas Nagel's Secular Argument

[00:00:00]In 2012, a philosopher who had spent his entire career as a committed atheist published a short book that produced one of the most ferocious intellectual reactions in recent academic history.

[00:00:13]He was not a young provocateur looking for attention.

[00:00:16]He was Thomas Nagel, professor at NYU, author of some of the most cited papers in 20th century philosophy, the man who wrote the essay What is it like to be a bat? that had become required reading in philosophy of mind departments around the world.

[00:00:33]He was, by any measure, one of the most respected analytic philosophers alive.

[00:00:39]And what he wrote in Mind and Cosmos was this: The neo-Darwinian materialist account of the universe, the view that matter plus blind natural selection fully explains everything, including [music] consciousness, reason, and moral value, is almost certainly false.

[00:01:00]The reaction from the scientific and philosophical establishment was, in places, barely controlled fury.

[00:01:08]Richard Dawkins called the book one of the most despicable science books in recent years.

[00:01:13]Steven Pinker tweeted a single dismissive sentence.

[00:01:17]Reviewers who had never previously questioned Nagel's caliber >> [music] >> suddenly found his reasoning naive, his arguments confused, his conclusions an embarrassment.

[00:01:29]A philosopher who had earned decades of intellectual respect found himself being treated by some quarters as though he had simply lost his mind.

[00:01:39]He had not lost his mind.

[00:01:41]He had followed an argument.

[00:01:44]The argument begins with the hard problem of consciousness, the same problem that has run through this entire catalog, from Planck and Schrödinger through Edith Stein, C.S. Lewis, Philip Goff, and back [music] through every thinker who has tried to explain why there is an inside to experience rather than just the outside that physics describes. Nagel's version is precise and unsparing. Consciousness, the fact that there is something it is like to see red, to feel pain, to understand a proof, cannot be reduced to physical processes.

[00:02:22]Not because we don't know enough neurosciences yet, because the reduction is in principle [music] impossible. A complete physical description of the brain describes structure, function, behavior, the outside of a process.

[00:02:37]It never, in principle, includes the inside, the feel, the experience itself.

[00:02:44]And this means that any account of the universe that begins with purely physical matter and tries to derive consciousness from it has a permanent structural hole in it. The hole doesn't get smaller as the science improves. It is a consequence of what physical explanation is.

[00:03:02]So far, this is ground the catalog has covered.

[00:03:06]What Nagel does next is the move that made his book so explosive.

[00:03:11]He does not stop at consciousness.

[00:03:14]He extends the argument to cognition and to value.

[00:03:18]And in doing so, he makes a claim that goes far beyond the hard problem into territory that materialists found genuinely threatening.

[00:03:27]Cognition, the capacity to reason toward truth, to follow a valid argument, to recognize that a conclusion follows from premises, is not just consciousness.

[00:03:39]It is consciousness of a very specific kind, consciousness that tracks reality.

[00:03:45]And Nagel argues, in direct parallel to C.S. Lewis's argument from reason, that a purely Darwinian account of the mind cannot explain this.

[00:03:56]Natural selection selects for survival and reproduction.

[00:04:01]It does not select for truth.

[00:04:04]A belief system that reliably produces successful behavior in the ancestral environment could be completely false about the deeper structure of reality >> [music] >> and still be perfectly adaptive.

[00:04:17]The cognitive faculties we use to do physics, mathematics, and philosophy were not selected for their accuracy in those domains.

[00:04:26]They were selected for their usefulness in the African savanna.

[00:04:31]Why should we trust them when they venture into quantum mechanics or the foundations of ethics or the question of whether neo-Darwinism is true?

[00:04:41]The materialist who uses her rational faculties to argue for materialism is using instruments whose reliability on her own account she has no grounds to trust.

[00:04:53]This is the Louisian argument arrived at independently by a philosopher with no interest in defending Christianity and every professional incentive to avoid it.

[00:05:04]Then, value.

[00:05:07]If moral facts are real, if some things genuinely are right and others genuinely are wrong, not just as matters of evolutionary preference or cultural convention, but as objective truths, then they, too, cannot be explained by a purely physical universe.

[00:05:25]Physics describes what is.

[00:05:28]It has nothing to say about what ought to be. Moral facts, if they exist, are not physical facts. And yet they seem to exist. Nagel, like Kant and Plantinga before him, finds the denial of objective moral reality not just wrong, but uninhabitable.

[00:05:47]You cannot actually live as though nothing is genuinely right or wrong.

[00:05:52]The attempt to do so is not philosophical sophistication.

[00:05:56]It is a kind of permanent bad faith toward the most serious demands of your own experience.

[00:06:02]What Nagel proposes as an alternative >> [music] >> is not God.

[00:06:07]He is explicit about this, and it is the most intellectually honest feature of his book.

[00:06:12]He does not want theism.

[00:06:14]He finds it, he says, antecedently implausible in ways that he cannot fully articulate but cannot dismiss.

[00:06:22]What he proposes instead is what he calls a teleological universe.

[00:06:27]One in which the emergence of consciousness, reason, and value was not accidental, not a lucky byproduct of blind physical processes, but was built into the structure of nature from the beginning.

[00:06:39]Not designed from outside by an intelligent agent, but directed from within.

[00:06:45]Nature having a kind of intrinsic tendency toward the development of mind, the way a seed has an intrinsic tendency toward becoming [music] a tree.

[00:06:54]The universe in this picture is not indifferent to consciousness.

[00:06:59]It was always moving toward it.

[00:07:01]The emergence of beings capable of understanding the universe is not a cosmic accident. It is what the universe in some fundamental sense was for.

[00:07:12]Notice what Nagel has done.

[00:07:14]He has not become a theist, but he has abandoned the only alternative the materialist tradition offered, a universe of blind matter and chance from which mind emerged by luck.

[00:07:27]In its place, >> [music] >> he has proposed a universe with an intrinsic orientation toward mind.

[00:07:33]A universe that at its foundation has something like a purpose.

[00:07:38]The word he uses for this is teleological, directed toward an end, and the end is consciousness. [music] The end is beings who can understand the universe they are part of, who can ask why it exists, who can do mathematics and philosophy and fall in love and create art.

[00:07:58]The universe was built for this.

[00:08:00]This is where Nagel's secular argument and the theistic tradition converge so closely that the distance between them becomes almost invisible.

[00:08:10]Teilhard de Chardin argued that the entire evolutionary process was directed toward the Omega Point, a convergence of consciousness that was God.

[00:08:20]Hegel argued that the universe was the absolute becoming conscious of itself through the development of human thought.

[00:08:27]Aurobindo argued that matter was consciousness in self-concealment, now evolving back toward its source.

[00:08:35]Maximus the Confessor argued that everything in creation contains a logos, a divine rational principle, placed there by a creating mind that built intelligibility into the fabric of the world.

[00:08:49]All of these are versions of the same claim.

[00:08:52]The universe is not indifferent to mind.

[00:08:55]It was always moving toward mind. Mind is not the universe's accident. It is, in some sense, its point.

[00:09:04]Nagel does not use this language. He would resist it. He is a philosopher trained in the traditions of secular analytic philosophy, and he has no framework for God and no appetite for acquiring one.

[00:09:18]But the structure of what he argues is theologically significant in a way that cannot be dismissed just because the person arguing it doesn't want it to be.

[00:09:28]If the universe has an intrinsic teleology toward consciousness, if mind was built in, not added on, then the question of what grounds that teleology is not silenced by refusing to ask it.

[00:09:42]A universe oriented toward mind from the beginning without external direction is either a universe that has something like mind already built into its foundations, which is Goff's panpsychism, which converges with Berkeley's idealism and the Eastern non-dual traditions, or it is a universe directed by something.

[00:10:05]Nagel rules out direction from outside.

[00:10:08]What remains, when you follow the argument honestly, looks more like what the tradition has always called God than Nagel is comfortable admitting.

[00:10:17]He was attacked because the argument was dangerous, not dangerous in a political sense, but dangerous in the sense of being an argument that, followed honestly, does not stop where the people attacking it needed it to stop.

[00:10:31]A committed atheist of Nagel's stature saying that materialism is almost certainly false, that consciousness and reason and value cannot be derived from blind matter, and that the universe appears to have been oriented toward the development of mind from the beginning.

[00:10:48]This is not a religious claim, but it is a claim that makes religious conclusions far more available than the mainstream of secular philosophy had decided decades ago to allow.

[00:11:01]The savagery of the reaction was proportional to the proximity of the threat.

[00:11:06]What Nagel had done was not abandon reason.

[00:11:10]He had followed it somewhere that the establishment found inconvenient.

[00:11:15]If this changes how you understand what an honest secular philosophy of mind looks like at its limit, say so in the comments.

[00:11:23]And if you want to keep following arguments that don't stop where they're supposed to, subscribe.

[00:11:29]The question is still open.

[00:11:31]That's the most important thing Nagel established.