CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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Nagle has been yanking my chain for almost four decades now. He's most well known for his 1974 paper, What is it like to be a bat? The gist of that paper is:
1: Bats have some kind of subjective mental life.
2: We (meaning every conscious organism on the planet except the one bat under discussion) have no access to this mental life.
3: We don't understand how the physical activities of the brain generate subjective mental life.
4: Therefore, magic.
Actually, it's not quite that bad. Nagle is an atheist or agnostic, I forget which, so he actually concludes:
4: Therefore, something we don't understand is happening.
His best guess is that the universe has something teleological going on that's responsible for thought although he has no idea what it does because we don't understand how consciousness works.
Ironically, he inadvertently describes what this teleology is in his latest book: | Quote | I am drawn to a fourth alternative natural teleology, or teleological bias ...
... teleology would have to be restrictive in what it makes likely, but without depending on intentions or motives. This would probably have to involve some conception of an increase in value through the expanded possibilities provided by the higher forms of organization toward which nature tends: not just any outcome could qualify as a telos. That would make value an explanatory end, but not one that is realized through the purposes or intentions of an agent. |
"Mind and cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" Kindle location 1165-1171
Nagle doesn't seem to realize that he is describing Darwinian evolution "guided" by natural selection. The "value" is successful reproduction and when a mutation makes an individual better at reproducing than his ancestors, natural selection restricts only these favored individuals to tend to increase with time and eventually the whole population embodies this "value" of more successful reproduction. (And if the mutation decreases chances of successfully reproducing, it and the unlucky individual who possess it are restricted to decreasing.)
And all this is done without "...the purposes or intentions of an agent."
Dr. Nagle doesn't believe that a whole string of such valued mutations could ever arise naturally, so he attributes their appearance to magic/some sort of vague undefined teleology.
Anyone who has a sock they'd like to waste can post a reply to Dr. Torley explaining this. It won't succeed. Like the rest of the UD crew, Torley's misunderstanding of how the world works is of great comfort to him and he won't give it up easily.
Edited to fix mistypings because you can't copy and paste from a Kindle.
Edited by CeilingCat on Feb. 02 2013,16:20
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