The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to
explain such central mind-related features of our world as
consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to
account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher
Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire
naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory,
and cosmology.
Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed
through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary
biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that
led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the
conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either.
An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in
the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such.
Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in
any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if
the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind
may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth
of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than
mechanistic.
In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive
materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to
recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or
at least in being open to their possibility.
