TOM NAGEL'S
ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY ANNUAL LECTURE,
CONCEIVING
THE IMPOSSIBLE AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM,
An Introduction
by Ted Honderich
Tom Nagel was born in Serbia into a
Jewish family, studied at Cornell University, then Oxford, and then at Harvard
under John Rawls. He taught at Berkeley and Princeton before settling at New
York University. He was chosen as the first of the Royal Institute of
Philosophy Annual Lecturers after he became widely known 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 of the 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, perhaps more than any other contribution,
raises or involves 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 persistently contemplates
in the present lecture is the philosophical and scientific consensus, if a
conflicted consensus, that 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, say
something seen and arm movements?
Nagel allows that indeed there is
causal connection between conscious states or events and such resulting
physical events as arm movements, which is often taken as an irresistible argument
for a physicalism about consciousness. Nagel contemplates, differently, that
there is some or necessary connection between your conscious thinking and your
brain. There could not be a zombie – something physically absolutely identical
to you but unconscious.
But he denies that we understand such a
relation, understand how there can be such a relation of necessity. We cannot
make sense of how there can be
necessary connection between consciousness and brain. That is on the way to
being as incomprehensible for us as the thought or utterance that the number
379 has parents. For the thought of necessary connection between consciousness
and brain, we need concepts we just have not got, including concepts dealing
with our hesitation about consciousness even being in space at all.
He insists to real effect that 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. So 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.
Nagel’s four 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, 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, whose audacity has given rise to some
controversy about evolution. His moral
and political writings, as individual, include The Possibility of Altruism, 1970, and Equality and Partiality, 1991.