proximoception | (no subject)

I'm not really sure what Nagel's deal is lately. Is "natural teleology" really any different than Dennett's "forced moves"? Beyond the ridiculously misleading repurposing of the concept of purpose - since all we have the right to infer about influences on phenomena outside of existing conceptions of materiality is that they're, y'know, outside. There's a difference between (e.g.) a potential for consciousness implicit in reality that the matchstick of matter randomly struck into life and an already somehow conscious force actively waiting for embodiment. I'm starting to think he's an agnostic in the worst sense, someone trying to convince himself he can eat his life and have it too.

At the least he's one of the many people who hates reductionism along a given line so much that he falls into a different reductionism - rounding slightly differing philosophical friends down to categorical enemies. A repulsion that not infrequently backs one into the arms of the real enemies of the good.

Threaded | Flat

It's interesting how similar (from what I can gather, which I should admit from the outset is not much) Nagel's "natural teleology" is to Kant's concept of "purposiveness of nature" -- precisely because Kant's notion seemed to entail exactly what Nagel is trying (in vain) to argue against. Kant thought that you had to assume a kind of unity (I will not go so far as to call it a reducibility) to nature in order to understand it. He might be wrong about that, but it also seems like this is what the materialist camp is aiming to do, and that's fine. They should keep trying to explain consciousness the way they have been. That's the only way it will become obvious that it's wrong. It's not like people are going to stop wondering about consciousness because a stubborn subset of eliminativists have managed to pretend it doesn't exist.

I also think that he's (Nagel) right about them, overall. Consciousness is a big gaping hole in the entire project. The problem is that I don't think there's much anyone can conclude from this -- other than our sense of materialism almost certainly has to be wrong, or at the very least is centrally incomplete. And I think he's even right that this includes Darwinism, provided you accept that consciousness in the "hard problem" sense is not adaptive, which I don't think it can be. But I suppose a premise of "I have no idea what's going on, and neither do these guys," doesn't make for a very attractive pitch. One has to grasp for something more in order to sell a book. Apparently.

The other thing I don't understand is the appeal to "common sense". This unnecessarily cedes ground to the reductionist. The problem isn't about the "improbability" of consciousness in the face of "common sense"; flipping a coin and having it land perfectly on its edge is highly improbable, and repeated demonstrations of this might trouble our "common sense" about how coin tosses operate, but most of the phenomenon itself -- the movement of the hand, the mass of the coin, the force of gravity, the work of angular momentum -- all of these things are things that web asically understand. An "improbable" event is still an event you can basically explain. We can't explain jack shit about consciousness (again, in the "hard" sense). I don't know why Nagel would water-down that fact.