Mind and Cosmos

• Autores: David Yates
• Localización: Analysis, ISSN-e 1467-8284, Vol. 73, Nº. 4, 2013, págs. 801-806
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The central premises of Nagel�s argument against what he terms �the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature� (hereafter �neo-Darwinism�) are the following: (1) Remarkable features of the cosmos such as consciousness, cognition and value are intelligible to us; (2) such phenomena are not materialistically reducible; (3) only phenomena that are materialistically reducible are intelligible within the framework of neo-Darwinism.1 In Chapter 2, �Antireductionism and the Natural Order�, Nagel argues for (1) and offers suggestive remarks on what �intelligible� means, without ever approaching a definition. The remaining three chapters argue in turn that consciousness, cognition and value are not reducible, provide arguments as to why this renders them unintelligible for neo-Darwinists, and develop a sketch of an alternative way of understanding them. As Nagel puts it:

    The essential character of such an understanding would be to explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge neither as accidental side effects of the physical laws of nature nor as the result of intentional intervention in nature from without but as an unsurprising if not inevitable consequence of the order that governs the natural world from within. That order would have to include physical law, but if life is not just a physical phenomenon, the origin and evolution of life and mind will not be explainable by physics and chemistry alone. (32�3) The explicitly secular alternative that Nagel considers is the addition of teleological laws to the non-teleological laws of neo-Darwinism, whose function is to render the emergence of the remarkable phenomena intelligible.

    First, it should be noted that Nagel includes under the umbrella of reductionism positions whose proponents take them to be non-reductive, such as functionalism in the philosophy of mind (35�42). He clearly has in mind here a form of ontological reduction according to which the remarkable phenomena are, in some �