I think I largely side with Nagel’s critics on this one (though I haven’t read the book). To me, his ‘brute facts’ are simply a premature admission of defeat. Science is an endeavor to make the world understandable, apprehensible, to discover how things came to be the way they are. There’s no guarantee that this endeavor will succeed, of course; it may well be the case that the world just isn’t understandable, that there is no reason for it to be the way it is, that it’s random, chaotic, or mysterious. To me, the jury simply isn’t out yet, but I throw my coins in with the option I find more appealing, which simply is that there is some reason that we might discover; some people, as for instance the writer of the article, seem to favor the opposite option, which I personally can’t understand, but can accept.
However, the dismissiveness with which this is usually presented, and the air of superiority the proponents of such a picture usually assume towards us ‘mere materialists’—the insinuation that in looking for ‘mechanistic’ explanations, we fail to appreciate some ‘true beauty’ of a phenomenon, that there must be some paucity in a life that lacks fundamental mystery—frankly gets on my tits. The materialist, reductionist, whatever-you-want-to-call-it-ist picture is not cold, sterile and inhumane, quite to the contrary: it is a hopeful one, and it expresses the hope that in some way, the world makes sense, and that we are capable of making sense of it. Reductionist explanation, despite the unfortunate name, does not take away, but adds to phenomena: even if I know that love is just a chemical reaction induced by evolutionary pressure, that doesn’t make it in any way suddenly not love, anymore than knowing that my arm is a collection of cells reacting to neural impulses makes it in some way not my arm. There are different accounts valid on different levels: just as it is useless to describe the cause of somebody’s black eye in terms of cells contracting and expanding in response to neurochemical signals, it is useless to describe my relationship to my girlfriend in terms of the amount of certain chemical substances in my neural system—the information any hearer of the story cares about just wouldn’t be there. Any part of the world may be completely describable in terms of particles and fields doing their thing, but this doesn’t entail that any other description therefore ceases to be valid.
Such explanation will run counter to intuition—the mind-body problem here is an especially ferocious example: since the explanation of a phenomenon entails its reduction to a level in which it is absent (otherwise, we would face circularity), and we can’t imagine a level in which there is no mind, since the mind is what we do all our imagining with (more concretely, we can’t imagine mind coming from no-mind, since whenever we imagine anything, there’s always mind present, in the form of the ‘point of view’ inherent in our imaginings), any explanation is bound to seem grossly counter to experience. But this is not a reason to give up: if we’d done that, we would have made none of our greatest breakthroughs, like quantum mechanics, relativity and so on.
But I think any declaration of the form ‘science can’t explain…’ is simply premature, and somehow smells of throwing in the towel because things are beginning to get too hard (or, less charitably, of a hidden agenda in need of some promotion). The successes of science (as compared to everything else we’ve tried) are such that it seems worth sticking with it, at least for a couple of thousand years (if nobody comes up with something better, that is).
Anyway, coming back to Nagel’s book, if the arguments given in the article are faithful representations, then there indeed doesn’t seem much to be gained from it: take, for instance, the argument that our higher reasoning capacities aren’t adaptive. This seems pretty obvious: you don’t need to do calculus while hunting mammoths. But there’s certain capacities you do need—or that are, at the very least, advantageous. Taken together, these capacities consist of things like forming a strategy, reacting to changing parameters, forecasting dangers and opportunities—in other words, executing algorithms. But if you can execute arbitrary algorithms, you can execute all possible computations (this is known as computational universality), so at least potentially, higher reasoning capabilities come part and parcel with those even the writer of the article would agree were advantageous to early humans. And in forming a civilization, creating a society, it’s not hard to come up with a way how those higher reasoning capabilities could conceivably have developed.
The only downside is that a computing machine hardwired for one type of computation will in general have a hard time performing one that it does not natively implement—roughly, like emulating Windows on a Mac. And this is, of course, exactly what we find: certain hard-wired functions come so easily to us that we hardly register them being performed—facial recognition, the assessment of potential danger in a situation, and so on. But for much of these higher reasoning capabilities—doing calculus, forming a logical argument, constructing overly lengthy message board posts—, we have to exercise considerable mental effort. So in fact, the lambasted evolutionary picture predicts exactly what we observe—and much better so than the alternative: if our higher reasoning capabilities are the result of some form of design, why are they designed so poorly? Why do they not come to us as naturally as other, computationally equally complex, tasks?
Sorry, that became a bit of a rant… :rolleyes:
