Nagel. MQ.... K notes

N.MQ... K notes

Thomas Nagel. Mortal Questions (essays) (Cambridge 1979).

Essay: Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness

161. The dilemma identified by Nagel makes one wonder about the need for a unifier of the physically bifurcated: i.e., a soul.

Plainly Ryle would have said that these difficulties are resolved by seeing mental activity as a process and not an entity denoted by the word "mind." But for numerous reasons, Ryle gets little attention today, tho I venture there will be some return to his perspective based on the strange new world emanating from artificial intelligence.

Essay: What is it like to be a bat?

165a. Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem intractable."

Cites

Rosenthal: Materialism and the mind-body problem

Armstrong: A materialist theory of the mind

Dennett: Content and consciousness

Me: The intractability of the mind-body problem says something important. About what? For Descartes it meant that an immaterial substance is a causative agent. We might say today that the electrons that kick the human computer/robot into action are themselves motivated by some "external" prompt. That is, without the prompts of the mind, nothing happens.

The materialist would say that the robot generates its own prompts, and suffers under the delusion of free will. But then we must ask, why should there be such a strange ephemeral thing as a delusion of free will?

The Cartesian dualists perhaps avoid the implication of panpsychism, but the monists, neutral or otherwise, have some explaining to do. If bits of nature are both material and mental, that sounds rather like panpsychism, tho I suppose one can argue that these bits are a proper subset of the bits of whatever it is that constitute the universe.

Of course, isn't this form of monism really Cartesian dualism pushed back a step -- perhaps with a generous dose of idealism thrown in?

171. <-->

Cites Kripke

Naming and necessity

Wittgenstein on rules and private language

171. The mind-body problem may well be beyond human comprehension.

171b. Gives a Platonic view of reality:

"After all, there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them."

Not everyone agrees. I.e., the intuitionists (whom Platonist Goedel however KOd).

171b. Can there be altogether inaccessible facts? When one gets into the outer limits of set theory, one is inclined to answer affirmatively.

But further we have that some statements are undecidable by methods of formal proof. These include Diophantine equations that must exist, but that thus far haven't been specified. But, perhaps they may be specified; then we cannot say the facts about it are unknowable.

On the other hand, there are legions of real numbers that are in principle unspecifiable. These noncomputables imply exact positions on the number line that can never be accessed. So here you see that a basic fact about such a number is part of the realm of the unknowable. That illustrates that Nagel is correct in asserting that some facts -- seemingly ordinary ones at that -- are beyond human ken. Hence his suspicion that the mind-body problem contains scientifically unknowable truths or facts is not unreasonable.

Essay: Panpsychism

This relates to Russell's "neutral monism" (a term adopted by Nagel in a later book), which can be seen as a mode of panpsychism and of the mind-body problem in general.

Nagel has interesting comments on emergence.

193. "Panpsychism should be added to the list of mutually incomprehensible and hopelessly unacceptable solutions to the mind-body problem."

194. The acceptance of reductionism stems from a "desire to make the mind-body problem go away."