Tag: Thomas Nagel

What It Is Like to Create a Picture

Mark Davis1 Comment

I invoked Nagel’s ”What Is It Like to Be Bat?” in a brief blurb I recently wrote about a children’s book. Nagel’s essay came to mind because I was rereading PMS Hacker’s “IS THERE ANYTHING IT IS LIKE TO BE A BAT?,” which is shrilly capitalized in this online version. Hacker, as always, is ready with Wittgenstein for some final comments after having worked through the weird conceptual structures that attend to ideas like “what is it like to be something.”

In preparation, Hacker works his way through the transitive and intransitive concepts of consciousness (being conscious of something versus simply being awake and aware), then through how we talk about and conceive of phenomenal relationships between experiences and descriptions of the objects of those experiences. He ultimately dismisses all this “qualia” discussion in philosophy of mind:

None of this is mysterious, surprising or baffling. Nor is it the key to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness. For there are no mysteries — only empirical ignorance and conceptual mystification.

There is an interesting fissure in Hacker’s argument, I think, and it is exemplified by exactly the line of reasoning that he borrows from Wittgenstein and that dovetails with W’s notion of private language. The concern is with the objects of experience when using abstract references like “this,” “that,” and “thus”:

One would like to say ‘I see red thus,’ ‘I hear the note that you strike thus,’ ‘I feel sorrow thus,’ or even ‘This is what one feels like when one is sad, this when one is glad,’ etc. One would like to people a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises.

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Contingency and Irreducibility

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JaredTarbell2Thomas Nagel returns to defend his doubt concerning the completeness—if not the efficacy—of materialism in the explanation of mental phenomena in the New York Times. He quickly lays out the possibilities:

  1. Consciousness is an easy product of neurophysiological processes
  2. Consciousness is an illusion
  3. Consciousness is a fluke side-effect of other processes
  4. Consciousness is a divine property supervened on the physical world

Nagel arrives at a conclusion that all four are incorrect and that a naturalistic explanation is possible that isn’t “merely” (1), but that is at least (1), yet something more. I previously commented on the argument, here, but the refinement of the specifications requires a more targeted response.

Let’s call Nagel’s new perspective Theory 1+ for simplicity. What form might 1+ take on? For Nagel, the notion seems to be a combination of Chalmers-style qualia combined with a deep appreciation for the contingencies that factor into the personal evolution of individual consciousness. The latter is certainly redundant in that individuality must be absolutely tied to personal experiences and narratives.

We might be able to get some traction on this concept by looking to biological evolution, though “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” is about as close as we can get to the topic because any kind of evolutionary psychology must be looking for patterns that reinforce the interpretation of basic aspects of cognitive evolution (sex, reproduction, etc.) rather than explore the more numinous aspects of conscious development. So we might instead look for parallel theories that focus on the uniqueness of outcomes, that reify the temporal evolution without reference to controlling biology, and we get to ideas like uncomputability as a backstop. More specifically, we can explore ideas like computational irreducibility to support the development of Nagel’s new theory; insofar as the environment lapses towards weak predictability, a consciousness that self-observes, regulates, and builds many complex models and metamodels is superior to those that do not.… Read the rest

Bats and Belfries

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Thomas Nagel proposes a radical form of skepticism in his new book, Minds and Cosmos, continuing his trajectory through subjective experience and moral realism first began with bats zigging and zagging among the homunculi of dualism reimagined in the form of qualia. The skepticism involves disputing materialistic explanations and proposing, instead, that teleological ones of an unspecified form will likely apply, for how else could his subtitle that paints the “Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature” as likely false hold true?

Nagel is searching for a non-religious explanation, of course, because just enervating nature through fiat is hardly an explanation at all; any sort of powerful, non-human entelechy could be gaming us and the universe in a non-coherent fashion. But what parameters might support his argument? Since he apparently requires a “significant likelihood” argument to hold sway in support of the origins of life, for instance, we might imagine what kind of thinking could result in highly likely outcomes that begin with inanimate matter and lead to goal-directed behavior while supporting a significant likelihood of that outcome. The parameters might involve the conscious coordination of the events leading towards the emergence of goal-directed life, thus presupposing a consciousness that is not our own. We are back then to our non-human entelechy looming like an alien or like a strange creator deity (which is not desirable to Nagel). We might also consider the possibility that there are properties to the universe itself that result in self-organization and that either we don’t yet know or that we are only beginning to understand. Elliot Sober’s critique suggests that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics results in what I might call “patterned” behavior while not becoming “goal-directed” per se.… Read the rest