http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf
This last part of the article is the most forthright as to any agenda (Hasker is associated with ISCID) and may or may not put Nagel fully in context, thought I understand Nagel's most recent work
Mind and Cosmos has been attacked because it received some support from intelligent design supporters.
At any rate, I think this whole section brings up a real point and that is that it's difficult to not be a reductivist while remaining naturalistic ... but I think that would characterize your position
@Constance correct?
Nagle and the
cosmic authority problem
Thomas Nagel
The Last Word
“Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.”
"My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind.
Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. (p. 131)
Nagel himself, even though he shares in the “cosmic authority problem,” strenuously resists this facile appeal to Darwinism."
Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.
Nagel, however, wishes to resist any move in the direction of a religious interpretation.
He suggests that “the capacity of the universe to generate organisms with minds capable of understanding the universe is itself somehow a fundamental feature of the universe,” and while admitting that this “has a
quasi-religious ‘ring’ to it, something vaguely Spinozistic,” maintains that “one can admit such an enrichment of the fundamental elements of the natural order without going over to anything that should count literally as a religious belief” (p. 132).
Still, he is forced to admit (with an acknowledgment to Mark Johnson) that
“if one asks, ‘Why is the natural order such as to make the appearance of rational beings likely?’ it is very difficult to imagine any answer to the question that is not teleological” (p. 138 n.). I think it is fair to say that for Nagel, not being a reductivist
while remaining naturalistic has proved very difficult indeed.
Steve, this post of yours on Hasker, Nagel, and Langan has motivated me to read some of Langan, where I found this compact expression of his theory (worth reading) at the first link below. The idea of a 'block universe' in which time is not real is just an idea, one perspective among others taken on the ontological question that motivates us and has done so going back into our species' ancient history and late prehistory. From another perspective, our own individually and collectively, we approach this question from the vantage point, the innumerable successive vantage points, of 'lived reality' -- what we know from within our situation in the world through our interrogations of the world. As we see in our own time, sufficient interrogation of the world {of the nature of 'reality'} brings us to the point of recognizing and interrogating ourselves, our consciousness and its origin in the natural world. Finally in late 20th c. many perspectives on the relationship of mind to world, consciousness to reality, have come together in the fascinating field of consciousness studies, where the temporality of our existence and thinking can itself become the subject of our inquiry. Of course, Wallace Stevens had a poem for this, actually hundreds of poems written in the light of this inquiry, but the one I'll copy following the link to the short paper by Langan is a major example of the foregrounding of temporality in Stevens's phenomenological thought and art. I should add a note for readers of Stevens: he wrote that in his view "the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." So his poems require many readings, sometimes over many years, for one to recognize the intricate layering of his concepts and images in his poetry as a whole. Just realized that in this aspect too his poetry is like life, accumulating perspectives on experience, returning to the past, sensing the deep harmonics in conscious and subconscious existence.
A Very Brief History of Time - Christopher Michael Langan
THE PURE GOOD OF THEORY
I
ALL THE PRELUDES TO FELICITY
It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.
Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.
It is someone walking rapidly in the street
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.
Even breathing is the beating of Time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like
A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,
A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.
Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.
II
DESCRIPTION OF A PLATONIC PERSON
Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated
Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade
Of serpents like z rivers simmering,
Green glade and holiday hotel and world
Of the future, in which the memory had gone
From everything, flying the flag of the nude,
The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.
But there was one invalid in that green glade
And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,
Signal, a character out of solitude,
Who was what people had been and still were,
Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,
Ill of a question like a malady,
Ill of a constant question in his thought,
Unhappy about the sense of happiness.
Was it that, a sense and beyond intelligence?
Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond
Intelligence? On what does the present rest?
This platonic person discovered a soul in the world
And studied it in his holiday hotel.
He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.
III
FIRE-MONSTERS IN THE MILKY BRAIN
Man, that is not born of woman but of air,
That comes here in the solar chariot,
Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye—
We knew one parent must have been divine,
Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,
Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,
While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,
As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was
A metamorphosis of paradise,
Malformed, the world was paradise malformed . . .
Now, closely the ear attends the varying
Of this precarious music, the change of key
Not quite detected at the moment of change
And, now, it attends the difficult difference.
To say the solar chariot is junk
Is not a variation but an end.
Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind
And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
Belief, that what it believes in is not true.
IV
DRY BIRDS ARE FLUTTERING IN BLUE LEAVES—
It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,
The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
These devastations are the divertissements
Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog,
Whines in its hole for puppies to come see,
Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust,
Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets,
Flies like a bat expanding as it flies,
Until its wings bear off night's middle witch;
and yet remains the same, the beast of light,
Groaning in half-exploited gutturals
The need of its element, the final need
Of final access to its element;
Of access like the page of a wiggy book,
Touched suddenly by the universal flare
For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat
The eloquence of light's faculties.
--Wallace Stevens
, this does clarify for a me a difference in our thinking (among many). Namely, that she believes consciousness to be truly fundamental and thus phenomenology capable of revealing fundamental truths; whereas I believe consciousness to co-arise with energy-matter from a yet more fundamental substance, and thus believe that phenomenological introspection can't penetrate the most fundamental level of reality.
Remind me where you lay out your illuminations based on the jellyfish and Drosophila Melanogaster, would you? Embedded links to those posts will best serve the purpose for me and others in pursuing this discussion.