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Nagelisms

Posted September 3rd, 2014 by Lesley Hazleton

For your enjoyment, a few quotes from Thomas Nagel, the philosopher of consciousness who famously asked “What’s it like to be a bat?”  (His answer:  we’ll never know.)

To my mind (as it were), Nagel is one of the most readable philosophers out there.

These are all from “The View From Nowhere.”

On death:

         — “I believe there is little to be said for it.”

         — “Each of us has been around for as long as he can remember. It seems like the natural condition of things.”

On truth:

 — “If truth is our aim, we must be resigned to achieving it to a very limited extent, and without certainty.”

— “If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.”

 On being human:

— “The human race has a strong disposition to adore itself, in spite of its record.”

— “Our constitutional self-absorption together with our capacity to recognize its excessiveness make us irreducibly absurd.”

 On philosophy:

   — “Philosophy is after eternal and non-local truth, even though we know that’s not what we’re going to get.”

   — “Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.”

And this:

— “I would rather live an absurd life engaged in the particular than a seamless transcendental life immersed in the universal.”

 

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File under: agnosticism, existence | Tagged: Tags: consciousness, death, philosophy, The View From Nowhere, Thomas Nagel, truth, what's it like to be a bat? | 9 Comments
  1. juliakgruwell says:
    September 3, 2014 at 12:13 pm

    Thank you, Leslie!

  2. juliakgruwell says:
    September 3, 2014 at 12:13 pm

    Sorry about the misspelling, Lesley!

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 3, 2014 at 1:09 pm

      Happens awl the time!

  3. willow1 says:
    September 3, 2014 at 1:53 pm

    A lot like Ambrose Bierce. But a little less toothy.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 4, 2014 at 9:08 am

      Ah, but what you sacrifice in bite you gain in depth!

  4. Omer says:
    September 16, 2014 at 2:21 pm

    Leslie,

    Did you read Nagel’s book on Mind and Cosmos: Why the NeoDarwinian Materialist Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False?

    Please check out this excellent review by Alvin Platinga

    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/110189/why-darwinist-materialism-wrong

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 16, 2014 at 4:03 pm

      I did read Mind and Cosmos, but found it disappointing, especially for Nagel. Very anthropocentric, and oddly reliant on personal intuition rather than real thought. Nagel sets high store by his intuition, but as another reviewer commented in the New York Review of Books, “does anyone find it intuitive that we’re hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour?” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/awaiting-new-darwin/

  5. Omer says:
    September 24, 2014 at 1:03 am

    Leslie,

    Thanks for your reply. I checked the link you sent.

    Please check out the following for an engaging series on “Nagel and his critics.”

    http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/03/nagel-and-his-critics-part-vii.html

    I think Edward Feser is an excellent philosopher on many issues.

  6. Omer says:
    September 24, 2014 at 1:19 am

    Lesley,

    With regards to your disappointment Mind and Cosmos on with regard to intuition and anthropomorphism,

    please also check this the following.

    I think this very brief blog post correctly exposes couple errors of reasoning in the NYTimes review you linked.

    http://lifesprivatebook.blogspot.com/2013/03/h-allen-orr-kant-and-nagel.html

Being A Bat

Posted June 6th, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

Blame the philosophers for the fact that I’ve been blogging less lately.  I had no idea philosophy could be such a heady endeavor.  Seriously heady, like I’d smoked some really strong intellectual dope and set my mind reeling.

Blame two philosophers in particular.  The first is Thomas Nagel, who asked the question “What’s it like to be a bat?” in a famed article that’s included in his book Mortal Questions.  That particular question is just about a perfect Zen puzzle.  We may know how sonar works, and how a bat flies, but we’ll never know what it’s like to be a bat.  Yet we’ll keep asking nonetheless (or at least Nagel and many others will).  How human is that?

batwoman(Personal aside:  The bat question is of particular relevance hereabouts since the resident cat occasionally catches one and brings it indoors, half-dead but still far too alive, creating an eerie panic in me.  My latest purchase is a bat net.  And yes, that’s Batwoman to the left.  Now back to Nagel…)

He’s a leading philosopher of consciousness (I’ll make that PoC for short) — the idea being that human consciousness is more than the sum of its parts, i.e. the brain.  Not only are we aware (some of us, anyway), but we have the ability to reflect on that awareness.  That is, we’re graced — or cursed — with meta-consciousness.

The margins of my copies of Nagel’s books are full of my scribblings, many of them admiring (multiple exclamation marks!).  But an increasing number of grumbles began to show up (question marks and disputatious comments).  Then I saw that Nagel himself had a grumble or two with another PoC called Colin McGinn, and I had to see what they were about.

So thanks to Nagel, I am currently smitten with McGinn, on whose head (in whose head?) lies full responsibility for the questionable state of my mind these days.  In one book, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, he posits that “consciousness has a hidden structure, a covert essence.”  It’s “like an iceberg, where the water line corresponds to the limits of introspection.”

How big an iceberg?  He spends several pages speculating as to the manifold ways in which our conception of space (and specifically, the mind as contained in the physical space of the brain) may be entirely off:

Space might objectively be quite other than the way we take it to be. The word ‘space,’ from this viewpoint, is just a label for whatever is out there as the containing medium of all things; it carries no substantive implications about the properties of the thing it denotes. Accordingly, we might have a very partial — or even erroneous — view of the true structure of space… We experience space in a certain way, by means of our senses, and think about it in that way, but that may not represent what space is really like in itself…

We have a kind of folk theory of space, a view of it that we grow up with and take for granted. It is based on the evidence of our senses, especially vision, and it reflects our specific viewpoint as beings roaming around the surface of one small planet in one corner of a mind-bogglingly large universe…

Citing relativity theory and quantum theory, he argues that this folk theory of space “has been hung out to dry repeatedly.”

If space is just that which connects all causally interacting things, then conscious minds must be in space in some sense. But understanding the manner of this containment defeats us. We would need a new conception of space to comprehend how minds can slide into its welcoming folds… We know it cannot depict space as simply the repository of objects with shape, size, and solidity, because consciousness is not like that. It must be capacious enough to house entities of another kind entirely… To put it dramatically, brains are objects that carry their own space with them.”

It gets weirder (I’m tempted to say it gets infinitely weirder).  In fact the next several pages made me feel as though I were reading David Foster Wallace on infinity, or one of Samuel Beckett’s novels (Watt, perhaps, which as I remember it makes ‘Waiting for Godot’ seem lucidly straight-forward).  And then comes a line break — time to breathe — and McGinn starts off the next section with this:

It is extremely difficult to get one’s mind around the picture I am suggesting.  We are on the outer edge of the sayable. I can really only focus on these ideas for a few minutes every month or so.

Oh. On the one hand, this was delightfully reassuring. It was good to know that McGinn’s head was spinning too.  On the other… well, I’d been reading him every day for just about a month or so…

And I can’t seem to stop. In fact this whole PoC business is such strong dope that instead of a soothingly empty trash novel, I’m taking Nagel and McGinn on the plane to Edinburgh, where I’m giving a talk next week at TEDGlobal. I’m not sure if this bodes well or poorly for the talk, which is on the essential interdependence of faith and doubt, and the adamant refusal of fundamentalism to recognize either. I guess you could call that another kind of heady endeavor.

I kind of wish McGinn (whom I’ve never met) was going to be there to hold my hand.

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File under: agnosticism, existence | Tagged: Tags: Colin McGinn, consciousness, David Foster Wallace, philosophy, Samuel Beckett, TEDGlobal, Thomas Nagel, what's it like to be a bat? | 8 Comments
  1. Yeshua21 says:
    June 6, 2013 at 3:16 pm

    Wonderful topic! Be sure to check out “David Chalmers on Consciousness” (on YouTube) and the links in the footnotes to this thought experiment:

    ” Imagine, if you will, your brain setting on the table in front of you, complete with the necessary blood supply, temperature control, and appropriate “wiring” running to your eyeballs (and connected in all respects to the various nervous systems of your body). Now, ask yourself: Where is the scene I am contemplating taking place?

    * Is it taking place wherever you happen to be at the moment–in front of your computer, perhaps, somewhere on planet earth!?

    * Or is it being represented in the occipital lobe of your brain (that very brain which you see spread out on the table in front of you)?

    If the answer is “in your brain” — where, really, is your brain? And what is the ontological status of the external reality being represented before your very eyes?

    But if the answer is, “out here–obviously” — who, really, are you? And how are you observing this spatiotemporal world?

    http://jeshua21.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/a-spiritual-exercise/

  2. Nasir Khan says:
    June 6, 2013 at 10:24 pm

    Well, good thinking but you may also read “The Refutation of the Philosophers” by Imam Ghazali, a prolific Islamic writer of the middle ages to discern better into this mind bogling study that went rather astray in free-thinking seculars.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 7, 2013 at 8:42 am

      But Nasir, the whole point is to stray! And to enjoy doing it.

  3. anon says:
    June 7, 2013 at 4:29 am

    Nagel, Chalmers, and McGinn are famous names in Philosophy of Mind, but none of their views are mainstream (does not mean their views are wrong!). Kim’s Philosophy of Mind presents an overview of the field with a physicalist bias which is closer to mainstream philosophy, I believe.

    Youtube university has videos of the Berkeley first year course on philosophy of mind which covers all this material. I watched and enjoyed Campbell’s teaching of the material, but Searle’s version of the course is there too. Searle is the creator of the famous Chinese Room thought experiment.

  4. Madar says:
    June 12, 2013 at 10:22 pm

    Consciousness is anchored in knowledge, and I understand the category of knowledge that includes ‘all information obtained through the use of the intellect, experimentation or hearing’ is that current world-community is concerned about.
    Philosophy cannot assure the truth because it does not produce certainty (a tangible reference), a reason why many eminent scientists went on to hint “Philosophy is dead” (Yes, Nietzsche would be offended).

    Knowledge should be able to persuade both mind & heart, and today’s Scientism fails to explore/explain the moral compass within human-being, and restricts itself to the outer-shell, the tangible. Much like the Idolaters & Anthropomorphists the scientific arena is being hijacked by those in love with the material, and therefore ignoring the spiritual, a flawed way of seeking knowledge.

    I appreciate your Ted-talks and your works/articles on Islam. Masha’Allah you’re doing good job.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 23, 2013 at 5:13 pm

      Thanks, Madar — though as you’ll see when the new TED talk is released, I’m wary of both certainty and all claims to ‘the truth.’ I’m jet-lagged right now, so can’t vouch for the clarity of this reply, but to maintain that science does not have the ‘answer to everything’ does not mean that science is flawed — thank god for science! — only that certain scientists (like certain believers) are being overly ambitious, seduced into thinking it is the only valid one.

      • Madar says:
        June 26, 2013 at 3:15 am

        I agree, Science is the means, not the end itself.
        As the philosopher of religion Keith Ward said scientism is philosophically inconsistent or even self-refuting, as the truth of the statements “no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically (or logically)” or “no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true” cannot themselves be proven scientifically, logically, or empirically.

  5. MOHAMMED’S STORY | DUCKPOND says:
    June 28, 2013 at 1:36 am

    […] to Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions, Lesley Hazelton […]

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