I've just finished reading Thomas Nagel's newish book, "Mind and Cosmos" (Oxford, 2012).  It's deeply flawed, but in spite of its flaws some of the points it makes deserve more attention, especially in the broader culture, than they're likely to receive in the context of a book that's gotten plenty of people exercised about its flaws.  I'm currently undecided about whether to recommend reading his book for these points, as they are probably made, without the distracting context and possibly better formulated, equally well elsewhere, notably in Nagel's  "The Last Word" (Oxford, 1997).  The positive points are the emphasis on the reality of mental phenomena and (more controversially) their ireducibility to physical or even biological terms, the unacceptability of viewing the activities of reason in similarly reductive terms, and a sense that mind and reason are central to the nature of reality.  Its greatest flaws are an excessively reductionist view of the nature of science, and, to some degree in consequence of this, an excessive skepticism about the potential for evolutionary explanations of the origins of life, consciousness, and reason.

One of the main flaws of Nagel's book is that he seems --- very surprisingly --- to view explananations in terms of, say, evolutionary biology, as "reductively materialist".  He seems not to appreciate the degree to which the "higher" sciences involve "emergent" phenomena, not reducible---or not, in any case, reduced---to the terms of sciences "below" them in the putative reductionist hierarchy.  Of course there is no guarantee that explanations in terms of these disciplines' concepts will not be replaced by explanations in terms of the concepts of physics, but it has not happened, and may well never happen.  The rough picture is that the higher disciplines involve patterns or structures formed, if you like, out of the material of the lower ones, but the concepts in terms of which we deal with these patterns or structures are not those of physics, they are higher-order ones.  And these structures and their properties---described in the language of the higher sciences, not of physics---are just as real as the entities and properties of physics.  My view --- and while it is non-reductionist, I do not think it is hugely at variance with that of many, perhaps most, scientists who have considered the matter carefully --- is that at a certain very high level, some of these patterns have genuine mental aspects.  I don't feel certain that we will explain, in some sense, all mental phenomena in terms of these patterns, but neither does it seem unreasonable that we might.  ("Explanation" in this sense needn't imply the ability to predict perfectly (or even very well), nor, as is well known, need the ability to predict perfectly be viewed as providing us with a full and adequate explanation---simulation, for example, is not necessarily understanding.)   Among scientists and philosophers who like Nagel hold a broadly "rationalist" worldview David Deutsch, in his books The Fabric of Reality and especially The Beginning of Infinity, is much more in touch with the non-reductionist nature of much of science.

Note that none of this means there isn't in some sense a "physical basis" for mind and reason.  It is consistent with the idea that there can be "no mental difference without a physical difference", for example (a view that I think even Nagel, however, agrees with).

This excessively reductionist view of modern science can also be found among scientists and popular observers of science, though it is far from universal.   It is probably in part, though only in part, responsible for two other serious flaws in Nagel's book.  The first of these is his skepticism about the likelihood that we will arrive at an explanation of the origin of life in terms of physics, chemistry, and perhaps other sciences that emerge from them---planetary science, geology, or perhaps some area on the borderline between complex chemistry and biology that will require new concepts, but not in a way radically different from the way these disciplines themselves involve new concepts not found in basic physics.  The second is his skepticism that the origins of consciousness and reason can be explained primarily in terms of biological evolution.  I suspect he is wrong about this.  The kind of evolutionary explanation I expect is of course likely to use the terms "consciousness" and "reason" in ways that are not entirely reductive.   I don't think that will prevent us from understanding them as likely to evolve through natural selection.   I expect we will see that to possess the faculty of reason, understood (with Nagel) as having the---fallible, to be sure!---power to help get us in touch with a reality that transcends, while including, our subjective point of view, confers selective advantage.  Nagel is aware of the possibility of this type of explanation but --- surprisingly, in my view --- views it as implausible that it should be adaptive to possess reason in this strong sense, rather than just some locally useful heuristics.

The shortcomings in his views on evolution and the potential for an evolutionary explanation of life, consciousness, and reason deserve more discussion, but I'll leave that for a possible later post.

The part of Nagel's worldview that I like, and that may go underappreciated by those who focus on his shortcomings, is, as I mentioned above, the reality of the mental aspect of things, and the need to take seriously the view that we have the power, fallible as it may be, to make progress toward the truth about how reality is, about what is good, and about what is right and wrong.  I also like his insistence that much is still unclear about how and why this is so.  But to repeat, I think he's somewhat underplaying the potential involvement of evolution in an eventual understanding of these matters.  He may also be underplaying something I think he laid more stress on in previous books, notably The View from Nowhere and the collection of papers and essays Mortal Questions: the degree to which there may be an irreconcilable tension between the "inside" and "outside" views of ourselves.  However, his attitude here is to try to reconcile them. Indeed, one of the more appealing aspects of his worldview as expressed in both Mind and Cosmos and The Last Word is the observation that my experience "from inside" of what it is to be a reasoning subject, involves thinking of myself as part of a larger objective order and trying to situate my own perspective as one of many perspectives, including those of my fellow humans and any other conscious and reasoning beings that exist, upon it.  It is to understand much of my reasoning as attempting, even while operating as it must from my particular perspective, to gain an understanding of this objective reality that transcends that perspective.

So far I haven't said much about the positive possibilities Nagel moots, in place of a purely biological evolutionary account, for explaining the origin of life, consciousness, and reason.  These are roughly teleological, involving a tendency "toward the marvelous".  This is avowedly a very preliminary suggestion.  My own views on the likely role of mind and reason in the nature of reality, even more tentative than Nagel's, are that it is less likely that it arises from a teleological tendency toward the marvelous than that a potential for consciousness, reason, and value is deeply entwined with the very possibility of existence itself.  Obviously we are very far from understanding this.  I would like to think this is fairly compatible with a broadly evolutionary account of the origin of life and human consciousness and reasoning on our planet, and with the view that we're made out of physical stuff.