Thomas Nagel, 'Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem' A Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture Introduction to it by Ted Honderich Tom Nagel was born in Serbia into
a Jewish family, studied at Cornell University, then Oxford, and then Harvard
under John Rawls. He taught at Berkeley and Princeton before settling at New York
University. The first of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecturers,
he first became widely known in philosophy in 1974 for a paper whose leading
idea is that something's being conscious is there being something it is like to be that thing, say a bat, or
you. The question and title 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' has done more than
any other to unsettle confidence among hard physicalists about the nature of
consciousness. It gives content and salience to common talk of subjectivity.
This contribution to the
contemporary philosophy of mind is like any other conception of consciousness
in issuing in the question of how our consciousness is related to the brain,
often called the mind-body problem. This question of relation, perhaps
inadvisably, has been given more attention than the direct question of what
it is to be conscious, the nature of that fact, what that fact is.
What Nagel contemplates in the
present lecture, after some opening reflections on what each of us can gather
from our first-person experience, is whether a state or event of being
conscious is an objective physical state. More particularly, is your having a
thought or a feeling right now a physical state of your brain? Is it, more
particularly, as in the theory of functionalism, and in all or most cognitive
science, a physical state that 'functions' in a certain way, which is to say
no more than that it is a state or event that stands in certain causal
connections with earlier and later events?
Nagel allows that there is some necessary
connection between your conscious thinking and your brain. But he denies that
there is a satisfactory answer that identifies
your piece of thinking or feeling with a physical state, takes the thinking
or feeling as being objectively physical. He allows that there is causal
connection between conscious states or events and physical events, say your
arm movements, which is very often taken as an irresistible argument for a
physicalism.
But, he elaborates and concludes,
we cannot understand how there
could be causal connection between consciousness and brain. That is on the
way to being as incomprehensible as the thought or utterance that the number
379 has parents. For the thought of causal connection between consciousness
and brain, we need concepts we just have not got, including concepts dealing
with our hesitation about consciousness being in space.
We really must not suppose we can
rightly believe or try to believe what we cannot understand. Our situation,
therefore, is that we must admit we have no answer to how consciousness is
related to the brain, no theory of how it is or is not physical. The old and
disdained dualism of body and mind, the first physical and the second not,
may still be true in this age of a plethora of physicalist theories. Whatever may happen in the unforeseeable
future, after we are all dead, we have to accept that the mind-body problem
is for us a mystery. This has prompted some others into as much or greater
pessimism, and given pause to more of us.
His immediately relevant books are
Mortal Questions, 1979, which
contains the paper 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?' as well as papers on
matters of life and death, The View
From Nowhere, 1986, including 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?', What Does It All Mean?, 1987, ideal as
an introduction to philosophy, and Mind
and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost
Certainly False, 2012, which has caused some controversy. His moral and political writings include The Possibility of Altruism, 1970, and
Equality and Partiality, 1991.
They and the lecture raise
questions of which he is aware but which may trouble you still more. What is
an objective physical fact? If your being conscious is not an objective
physical fact, maybe not taking up space, how can it cause the objective physical fact of where you are or the
movement of your arm? If there are different kinds of physicality, what are
they? I myself wonder if there is what deserves the name of being
subjectively physical.
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