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Ian Lang · Veteran Member

Nagel - Mind and Cosmos

Ian Lang · Veteran Member

My notes on chapter 3.

Nagel – Chapter 3

Summary

Section 1 – a brief history and the need for a conceptual revolution
Section 2 – the problem of consciousness
Section 3 – the nature of explanation
Section 4 – constitutive options - reductive or emergent
Section 5 – historical options – causal
Section 6 –historical options - teleological and intentional
Section 7 – consciousness, cognition and intentionality - and the way forward?

My comments

Terminology

Nagel says there is a danger of terminological confusion(!) in his use of the word reductionist (footnote page 54) and distinguishes it from his use of the word reductive.

According to Nagel, a reductive theory analyses the properties of complex wholes in terms of their most basic elements. A reductionist theory relies exclusively on physical laws for explanation and could include emergence ( page 11) in which case it would not be reductive. An anti-reductionist theory can be reductive provided it doesn't rely exclusively on physical laws.

By physical Nagel means subject to current scientific laws including quantum mechanics, relativity and electromagnistism. By natural he means subject to additional unknown laws which together with current physical laws explain everything.

Emergence

Nagel rejects emergence as “magic” that doesn't really explain things (last para page 55, page 56). Bottom page 60 he talks of “the brute fact of emergence, not explainable in terms of anything more basic, and therefore essentially mysterious” In other words, he is a reductive himself but wants some additional mental particles and purposeful force added to the physical laws to enable an explanation of consciousness.

Observational standpoints

Nagel takes a reductive approach to different “observational standpoints”, e.g. objective and subjective, of the same thing. He insists that they cannot be the same thing if they appear to be different from different points of view, and must therefore be physically different. i.e. j doesn't = f .

I would argue that the difference is in the different information conveyed (including the experience) in the different points of view rather than an objective physical difference in the underlying reality.

The challenge of explanation

Nagel demands a reductive but complicated (section 3) causal explanation of consciousness from wet grey matter to subjective experience. Without it, “psychophysical reductionism fails”. On the other hand he is content to explain his own convictions (prejudices) as ungrounded intellectual preferences (bottom page 26).

Nagel's hopeless task

His task is hopeless because consciousness (along with redness and other subjective experience) cannot be described in scientific language or formulae. In fact it cannot be described at all in any language. It can only be experienced or pointed at (“Its like...). If you accept that, then there isn't a “hard problem” of consciousness and the fly is out of the fly bottle (though there are still mysteries such as the impact of the subjective point of view and intentionality on reality).

But Nagel wants this description of consciousness to be the final result of the scientific explanation. He would not be satisfied with any explanation that completely described how consciousness emerges from the brain if it didn't have that final step of actually describing the experience.

Conceptual revolution

Nagel suggests there is a need for a conceptual revolution (page 42) and proposes adding new mental particles and purposeful forces. This would be a scientific revolution involving the natural world. Surely what is needed is a conceptual revolution that embraces emergence, the role of the observer and the nature of explanation i.e. expanding our minds rather than expanding science?

Nagel claims the Strawson approach of descriptive metaphysics (page 30) that claims physical science is just one aspect of the human point of view but can exist side by side with other aspects without subsuming them is not “sustainable”. Nagel wants a reductive all-embracing expanded science that explains everything including mind, values etc.. Wittgenstein would not approve!

Discussion points

Need for conceptual revolution Section 1

y = f

What does “=” mean in this equation?

Nagel (page 41) says “So if y really is f and nothing else, then f by itself , once its physical properties are understood, should be sufficient for the taste of sugar, the feeling of pain, or whatever it is supposed to be identical with. But it doesn't seem to be.”

Bottom page 41 - “I suspect that the appearance of contingency in the relation between mind and brain is probably an illusion, and that it is in fact a necessary but non-conceptual connection, concealed from us by the inadequacy of our present concepts.”

Explanation Sections 2 and 3

What is a “significant” explanation? Page 45

What is a “genuine” explanation? Page 50

What is a “satisfactory” explanation? (my question)

“How can I go back to yesterday?” requires a different explanation for a child (You can't because yesterday is the past and you can only go into the future) than for a scientist (discussion based on general relativity and the problems with time travel).

Explanations can be What (Description), How (Causal) or Why (Purpose) and at different levels of detail. How does Nagel deal with this?

Nagel says (page 44/45) “Subjective consciousness, if not reducible to something physical, would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution – even if the physical evolution of such [conscious] organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness.”

He says (page 47) “Systematic features of the natural world are not coincidences, and I do not believe that we can regard them as brute facts not requiring explanation.” But the underlying physical features such as electromagnetism or elementary particles are brute facts and can only be described. How or why they came to exist is inexplicable. If Nagel succeeds in coming up with a unifying theory that includes mind as well as matter, he is still going to be left with brute facts that cannot be explained but only described. You can only peel the onion of explanation so far. At the centre is a hard marble of brute fact.

Emergence Section 4

Do we accept Nagel's rejection of emergence as an explanation? (Pages 55/56)

Consider a cold dead pile of paper and firewood. A match is applied and dancing flames emerge from the carbon and the oxygen. There is an the enormous qualitative gap between the two states. Is phlogiston the explanation?

What does Nagel favour and why? Sections 5 and 6

Of the six options, which does Nagel favour and why?

A. His objection to causal/emergent (the current best scientific theory) is that firstly it requires emergence and secondly that there hasn't been enough time.
B. His objection to causal/reductive is that it requires the addition of mental microparticles,and while that seeks a deeper explanation than emergence, it is more obscure, and has the same historical problem of likelihood. (B worse than A?)
C &D His objection to intentional explanations (either reductive or emergent) is that they require God (C&D worse than B and A)
E&F His objection to teleological explanations is that they are obscure, just as obscure as the reductive causal alternative. But the reductive causal alternative has the attraction of greater unity. (E&F worse than B)
So is his best option A - causal emergent? Don't count on it! See the following chapters. The story continues.

Ian Lang

For 1^st October 2014

Richard Myers · Member

My notes on Ch. 1 and 2

THOMAS NAGEL: MIND & COSMOS
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. The mind-body problem ‘invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history’.
2. His target is the world picture that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of biology, chemistry and physics, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of everything in the universe through their unification.
3. The starting point for his argument is the failure of psychophysical reductionism
4. Also, he finds it hard to believe the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist through a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection [top of p.6]. ..’What is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?’ ‘In the available geological time...what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?’[p.6 halfway down] These problems of probability are not taken seriously enough. [Top of p.9]
5. [Top of p.7] ‘It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence...does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense. That is especially true with regard to the origin of life.’
6. Research in molecular biology allows ‘legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account’ [presumably this mention of ‘research’ refers to the material in note 4 above – perhaps along the lines that the complexity revealed by this research makes the idea of accidental mutations incredible]– ‘this can combine with the failure of psychophysical reductionism to suggest...principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.’
7. Two other important ‘constraints’ on his argument: some things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental for an explanation to be credible; and, we must have an ideal of discovering a single natural order that unifies everything.
8. The physical and biological sciences are expressed in ‘timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws.’ A more comprehensive understanding will have a historical dimension as well. This historical understanding has already entered biology [via evolutionary theory] and cosmology [via big bang theory]. Mind must be included ‘as the most recent stage of this long cosmological history’.
9. Could such a perspective be integrated with ‘that of the physical sciences as they have been developed for a mindless universe’?
10. Nagel has been stimulated by his reading of the defenders of intelligent design. He values the criticisms they have made of the orthodox scientific position but does not support the design conclusion.
11. Recognition of the limits of reductive materialism is a precondition of being open to the possibility of alternatives. But he is not offering an alternative himself.

Ch.2 Antireductionism and the Natural Order
1. ‘Antireductionism’ a general term for opponents of ‘materialist naturalism’.
2. The tendency of antireductionist doubts is negative. Other forms of understanding may be needed to supplement the physical sciences, it is suggested. ‘But the situation may be more serious than that.’ ‘There is some reason to doubt that a reductive materialism can apply even in biology...[or] can give an adequate account even of the physical world.’
3. This suggests that biology cannot [truly] be a purely physical science. The possibility opens up of a pervasive conception of the natural order very different from materialism – one that makes mind central, rather than a side effect of physical law.
4. It is time for antireductionist arguments to become more positive. Their very negativity is part of what drives reductionist programs as there appears to be no comprehensive alternative to reductionism – just the process of adding ‘peculiar extra ingredients like qualia, meanings, intentions’ etc to ‘the otherwise magnificently unified mathematical order of the physical universe’. ‘A genuine alternative to the reductionist program would require an account of how mind and everything that goes with it is inherent in the universe.’’...or perhaps in the worst case there is no comprehensive natural order...only disconnected forms of understanding.’ Whatever may be the result, it is time to start out from a larger conception of what has to be understood. [top of p.16]
5. Section 2: N’s guiding conviction is that mind ‘is not just an afterthought or an accident...but a basic aspect of nature’.
6. In addition to antireductionist arguments, there is support for such an enlarged conception in one of the background conditions of science – the assumption that the world is intelligible, without which scientific discoveries could not have been made. Is this order ‘just how things are’? N is ‘not disposed to see the success of science in this way.’ ‘...the intelligibility of the world, as described by the laws that science has uncovered, is itself part of the deepest explanation of why things are as they are...This assumption is a form of the principle of sufficient reason...’ [p.17 RM’s bold]
7. Section 3: before going further, N wants to consider the view that there are no limits to what the physical sciences can explain. ‘The story goes like this...’ Ultimately everything that exists and happens can be explained through the laws that govern the physical universe. We cannot grasp all of this as it is too complex, but we can attempt to discover the universal principles governing the elements out of which everything is composed, the laws of basic physics. The great step forward in this conception was the theory of evolution, later reinforced by molecular biology and the discovery of DNA.
8. N finds it puzzling that this ‘story’ is taken as self-evident. Everyone acknowledges there are vast amounts we do not know, yet it is assumed that the intelligibility of the natural order ‘has a certain form, being found in the simplest and most unified physical laws, governing the simplest and fewest elements, from which all else follows’. [RM’s bold] The question remains why those laws hold. But perhaps part of the appeal of this conception is that if the laws are simple enough, we can come to rest with them, as there is no alternative.
9. N is concerned with asking for that alternative. ‘If we want to try to understand the world as a whole, we must start with an adequate range of data, and those data must include the evident facts about ourselves.’ [bottom of p.20]
10. Section 4: outline of polar opposite of materialism, i.e. theism. It makes physical law the consequence of mind. It interprets intelligibility ultimately in terms of intention or purpose – resisting a purely descriptive end point. [But?] So long as the divine mind just has to be accepted...it leaves the process incomplete, just as the purely descriptive materialist account does. But theists tend to believe the creation could not be otherwise.
11. The interest of this to atheists is that it is an attempt to explain what does not seem capable of explanation by physical science. Theism attributes the mental phenomena found within the world to the working of a comprehensive mental source, of which they are miniature versions.
12. Section 5: ‘Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside, using very different resources. They have a shared ambition to encompass ourselves in an understanding that arises from but then transcends our own point of view.
13. N values that ambition. [This summary is sketchy from here on.]
14. Neither theism nor materialism provides a defence against radical scepticism. But perhaps a more modest kind of transcendence is possible which does not make our know;edge unassailably secure but equally is not self-undermining – a plausible picture of how we fit into the world.
15. Section 6: Both approaches fall short in this. Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial account of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.
16. theism does not offer a comprehensive account of the natural order. It does not have anything to say about how the intention it has identified operates except what is found in the results to be explained.
17. Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself. [top of p.27]
18. ‘It seems reasonable to run the test equally in the opposite direction: namely to evaluate hypotheses about the universe...by reference to ordinary judgements in which we have very high confidence. [top p.29]
19. Section 7: despite the deficiencies of theim and materialism, we cna continue to hope for a transcendent self-understnding. This also means rejecting the third approach of giving up the project and concentrating on internal understanding in line with Wittgenstein’s antimetaphysical approach, for example. This would mean believing that the quest for a single reality is an illusion. This would itself be a radical metaphysical claim. [Not sure about this argument].
20. ‘If we find it undeniable, as we should, that our clearest moral and logical reasonings are objectively valid, we are on the first rung of this ladder.’ [p.31] That is, the ladder to believing that there must be an expanded account of the order of the world of the kind N is arguing for – which N believes will include teleological elements,with mind and reason as basic aspects of a nonmaterialistic natural order.
Rm3/9/14

Harit Trivedi · Member

My notes on Chapter 4, Cognition.

Thomas Nagel’s: Mind and Cosmos, Ch. 4 (Cognition)

§ 1

1. “Consciousness presents a problem for evolutionary reductionism because of its irreducibly subjective (my italics) character” [p. 71, 2^nd sentence]. This is a salient point of the preceding chapters of the book.

2. In chapter 4, N deals with higher “mental functions” like thought, reasoning and evaluation (TRE – my abbreviation) under the umbrella of Cognition.

3. Senses and instincts give us our perspective of “now” (N calls it “immediate life”), while higher mental functions (TRE) enable the integration of a long running sequence of these “immediate life” perspectives from the past into a “whole life” perspective and even transcend the “now” and to explore the larger objective reality of nature and values.

4. N suggests [p. 71, para 2] that (a) high level cognitive capacities (= “mental functions” TRE) can be possessed only by beings … (with) consciousness, and (b) that implies that… their existence cannot be explained by evolutionary theory that is physically reductive. (and yet, see note 8 below in §2 where just such possible scheme is outlined! -HT)[1]

5. But he wishes to go beyond that here. The problem, as N sees it, is the capacity of gleaning knowledge of objective reality through (necessarily) subjective thoughts (and experiences? –HT). (Rephrased: How can knowledge of objective reality result from subjective thoughts and experiences?) That it is indeed so is truly awe-inspiring – but a problem? How so? Is a mathematical thought or a logical thought entirely subjective? - HT)

6. At the end of §1, N flags up two major issues (as he sees it): (a) Even conceding phenomenological consciousness (Sensation, Perception, Emotion or SPE), it credible that evolution, long anticipating the power of theoretical reasoning in advance, added that capacity at so early a stage (of evolution)? And (b) N flatly does not see how the faculty of theoretical reasoning could be naturalistically explained.

7. An historical aside from Elliot Sober’s critique in Boston Review (Nov 7, 2012): “… the co-discoverers of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, disagreed about how the (human) capacity for abstract theoretical reasoning should be explained. Darwin saw it as a byproduct. There was selection for reasoning well in situations that made a difference for survival and reproduction, and our capacity to reason about mathematics and natural sciences and philosophy is a happy byproduct. Wallace, on the other hand, thought that a spiritualistic explanation was needed. Nagel finds Darwin’s side effect account “very far-fetched”, but he does not say why.” Quite. Gut feelings can and do differ. Nagel does not sufficiently defend/justify his own gut feeling. This is part answer to (a) above.

§ 2

8. In §2 N offers two perfectly credible (to me, at any rate) ‘just-so’ stories showing how scientific and moral ‘realism’ (the belief that something is true, independent of anyone’s say-so) might be compatible with evolutionary development. This seems to undermine his assertion that the existence of ‘reason’ cannot be so explained. (Puzzling – HT).

§ 3

9. In §3 N appears bothered by the infallibility of ‘reason’ (unlike the fallibility of sense perception) not being provable by ‘reason’.While this may indeed be an humbling realisation, I fail to see it as posing any real problem.

10. In §4 N asks which faculty enables us to grasp the ‘real world’, escaping from the world of (sense) appearances?

11. On [p. 82, para 2] he asserts that perception connects us with the truth only indirectly while reason does so directly. He illustrates this with the example of how one learns to perceive ‘a tree’ (say) from the visual data on the retina. (A baby presumably does not, instinctively, directly, see it as such. – HT)

12. As against that, what one grasps with reason is ‘direct’. The contradiction entailed in the statement “I was driving South in the morning with the Sun to my right” is sensed directly. (N seems to use ‘directly’ here to mean ‘bypassing sense-data’. – HT)

13. (I am having trouble seeing N’s point. It seems to me that ‘reason’ is quite amenable to fitness-enhancing argument. If the ability to integrate a sequence of sense-data events (perceived over time/space) enables one to smell a danger ahead and to avoid it, it would evidently amount to enhanced fitness for survival. – HT)

14. (An aside: Note 13 would presuppose the ability to construct a context - that is, to segment the jumbled sense data and admit only relevant event/experience within it, and leave out the unrelated ones! A daunting challenge. – HT)

§ 4

15. A striking observation is made in [§4, para 3]: Ordinary perception uses a (roughly) truth-preserving algorithm to process data while reason uses an algorithm which sees (to it) that it is (roughly) truth-preserving. (Technically, an error-detecting or self-auditing algorithm.) N goes on to say, “Something has happened … our minds into immediate contact with the rational order of the world.”

16. (Perhaps a weaker version - Something has happened … our minds to latch on to a consistency-structure which, amazingly, seems to describe the orderliness of the world? - HT)

17. The ability to reason and thereby control belief/action introduces a slack (a kind of freedom, as N calls it, or, ‘a degree-of-freedom’ in physics jargon), freeing us from the “stimulus  immediate action” pattern [p. 84, para 1]. Guidance/control of long-term action (ostensibly in accordance with reason) takes up this slack/freedom.

18. In the penultimate para of §4 [bottom of p.84] N points to the remarkability of language and reason and calls them radically emergent (phenomena). He also assumes that they are not behaviourally explicable.

19. Like consciousness [p. 85, line 5], reason is inseparable from physical life of organisms that have it. (Not sure if this pits N against “machine reasoning” – HT.)

20. Expansion of consciousness … was originally a biological process, (which) in our species, has become a collective cultural process as well … a part of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself [last para of §4].

§ 5

21. In §5, para 1, N lists the requirements he places on a theory of everything.

22. In para 2, N suggests that if ‘reason’ exists, then so do ‘objective’ (i.e., independent of individual minds) truths. He goes on to include among them (1) ‘factual truths’ about the natural world (including scientific truths), (2) ‘external & necessary truths’ (logic, maths), and (3) ‘evaluative & moral truths’.

23. Starting from how the world appears to us, justifiable beliefs about objective reality can be formed using collective reason.

24. Such beliefs can and do affect actions.

25. In living organisms, mental processes like discovery and motivation are inseparable from physical processes.

26. Random thoughts: (I) think of the whole apparatus of TRE as a high-level integrator/predictor feeding on SPE which continually (1) maintains and updates both the self and the world, plus (2) anticipates the world. However, we are not entirely input-driven. We have wishes, desires, motives, revulsions… These partially depend on our history.

§ 6

27. N seeks to motivate a teleological explanation (TE) for life given that the design explanation is considered to be unscientific and the chance explanation unacceptable (by virtue of having insufficiently large likelihood).

28. N introduces Roger White’s argument [pp. 90-91] (sketch it!) to prepare grounds for the possibility of a teleological basis of living organisms (and consciousness).

29. It (TE) would have to constrain in some way without depending on intentions or motives [p. 91, line -1] the developments which lead in the past to live creatures.

30. This would involve some concept of increase in value through the extended possibilities provided by higher forms of organisation toward which nature tends. [p. 91, last line + p.92, line 1-2]. (Does N find it inconceivable that undirected processes could exist? Also, there is a possibility that Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics just might disturb our picture of the nearly understood universe - HT’s personal musings)

31. N concedes [p.92, para2] that TE defies the current scientific orthodoxy of time-independent physical laws governing the universe. Teleology would mean that some natural laws … are temporally historical in their operation. (I find these assertions merely plausible – without being either obvious, or incomprehensible. I would have liked an example. -HT)

32. Natural teleology would require two things. First that the … (non-teleological, timeless) laws … are not fully deterministic. They would leave open a range of alternative successor states, perhaps with associated degrees of probabilities [p.92, para -1]. (Laws governing the macroscopic world – i.e., thermodynamics – are like that. Allowing for non-equilibrium considerations only enriches the variety of possibilities, like self-organisation. It seems to me that N can have the first of his two requirements. -HT)

33. Second, among those possible futures, there will be some more eligible than others … ultimately the kind of replicating systems characteristic of life [p. 92, last para]. … They would be laws of self-organisation of matter, essentially, or whatever is more basic than matter [p.93, para 1, last line]. (Introducing non-equilibrium considerations enriches the variety of possibilities to include self-organisation. It seems to me that N already has what he requires. But what will breathe life into it? –HT)

34. N devotes the ultimate paragraph of the section to spelling out the implications of a TE. Among them, (1) some laws of nature would apply directly to the relation between the present and the future, rather than specifying instantaneous functions that hold at all times (i.e., differential equations[2] are out – HT) , (2) organizational and development principles are an irreducible part of the natural order, and that (3) not only the immediate characteristics (circumstances?) but also history (past events) play a role in setting future probabilities. (i.e., processes with some memory).

§ 7

35. N discusses two non-teleological answers to the question (why organisms such as us, with cognition, consciousness and capacity for action arose). One, it was by pure chance. He feels that that is no explanation. The other, a theist one, with divine intercession(s). He does not favour that either, for it takes recourse to forces outside of the natural ones.

36. N himself does not outline a candidate teleological explanation in terms of natural forces alone.

37. In the final footnote to the chapter he discusses and rejects the multiverse explanation.

SUMMARY:

§ 1: To Nagel,

A. It is not credible that the faculty of reason evolved as a mere byproduct during

evolution.

B. The existence of the faculty of theoretical reasoning is not capable of naturalistic

explanation.

§ 2: N presents two credible naturalistic accounts of how reason might have come about,

which seem to answer 1B in the affirmative.

§ 3: N asserts that perception connects with the truth indirectly while reason connects

directly.

§ 4: Language and reason are what N labels “radically emergent”, meaning they evolve

in a collective collaboration, “a part of the universe … becoming aware of itself”.

§ 5: N lays down the requirements on a theory of everything.

§ 6: Is N’s TE a toothless tiger – in that the current understanding of life already appears to incorporate most of the resulting features of TE?

§ 7: N feels that a naturalistic TE ought to exist, but offers none himself.

[1]Comments in blue ink (like these) are always my own musings.

[2]Under fairly general mathematical restrictions (viz., that the system be monogenic and holonomic), a physical system with given fixed start- and end-states (e.g., the past and the future) follows a fixed deterministic connecting trajectory. Nagel’s natural teleology envisages physical systems which fall outside of these restrictions.

Richard Myers · Member

Some of the final reflections on 7/1/15

5 Jan 2015
THOMAS NAGEL - MIND and COSMOS

This is my rather limited reflection on this book. I have left out a lot due to lack of time.

The method of the book
P.106 2nd para.:” Some comment is called for on the strange category jumping nature of this dispute. Street’s argument relies on an empirical scientific claim to refute a philosophical position in metaethics. I, even more strangely am relying on a philosophical claim to refute a scientific theory supported by empirical evidence. But I do not think the movement of thought is inappropriate in either case. Value judgements and moral reasoning are part of human life, and therefore part of the factual evidence about what humans are capable of. The interpretation of faculties such as these is inescapably relevant to the task of discovering the best scientific or cosmological account of what we are and how we came into existence. What counts as a good explanation depends heavily on an understanding of what it is that has to be explained.”

My comments:
The ‘philosophical claim’ he is referring to in this passage is value realism
I think this category jumping here and elsewhere is the cause of a lot of the unease people felt about the argument. Personally, I find his argument above compelling.
I remember also comments about ‘bad science’ in that Nagel fails to quantify the probabilities he talks about early on - his view of the improbability of random mutations giving rise to the variety we see - his ‘incredulity’. My tentative defence is that his incredulity is so great that he thinks quantification irrelevant. Why should we care about his gut feel? Because he is an eminent philosopher who claims to be widely read in the relevant literature; and see, for example, also the reference to Francis Crick’s view that the origin of life was ‘almost a miracle’ p.124.

What he believes
P.124 last para.:”These teleological speculations are offered merely as possibilities, without positive conviction. What I am convinced of is the negative claim that, in order to understand our questions and judgements about values and reasons realistically, we must reject the idea that they result from the operation of faculties that have been formed from scratch by chance plus natural selection, or that are incidental side effects of natural selection, or are products of genetic drift. When we ask ourselves, for example, whether revenge is a true justification or just a natural motive, or what kind of weight we should give to the interests of strangers or of other species, we should think of ourselves as calling on a capacity of judgement that allows us to transcend the imperatives of biology.”

P.127 2nd para.: “ It would be an advance if the secular theoretical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, could wean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps…”

My comments:
The last sentence in the first passage seems to me one of the few places where N says anything which links his book to the day-to-day world.
I read it as defending strong criticism of some current attitudes in the US and elsewhere. Am I imagining it, or could the reference to revenge relate to, say, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Guantanamo Bay or the 2nd Iraq war; and the interests of strangers or of other species to the US contribution to global warming, for example? The point being that he thinks this kind of strong criticism is undermined by neo-Darwinian views about values and reasons.

Subjective and objective
Some of his final comments on p.127/128 are about this: “it is too easy to forget how radical is the difference between the subjective and the objective…”
he quotes Wittgenstein with limited approval here; I am sure we all remember ‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ which I understand to be W’s early approach to subjective experience; I don’t think I understood enough about the later W to comment on it beyond a faint unease on my part
he is critical of W’s “anti-metaphysical conception of the true task of philosophy.” p.30 which I think Midgley supported, for example, in her essay about philosophy as plumbing;
Midgley is keen to assert the importance of the subjective in the face of the imperialist ambitions of ‘objective’ science, as was W. N seems to me to be in the same tradition but more objective, more worried about the inadequacy of current ‘objective’ accounts of the subjective. M quoted N with approval on subjectivity and objectivity as different ends of a spectrum. [see Nagel in index of The Essential Midgley]
Midgley I think did not see there was really a mind-body problem; I seem to remember she spoke of two different aspects of one thing, comparing it to the inside and outside of a teapot. Nagel still sees a problem.

Value realism
This was a surprise to me. I did not think any modern philosophers held this view.

N explains it throughout the first sections of the chapter on value. One formulation is on p.102: “The dispute between realism and subjectivism is not about the contents of the universe. It is a dispute about the order of normative explanation.” And then in the 3rd paragraph:”Instead of explaining the truth or falsity of value judgments in terms of their conformity to our considered motivational dispositions or moral sense, as the subjectivist does, the realist explains our moral sense as a faculty that aims to identify those facts in our circumstances of choice that count for or against certain courses of action, and to discover how they combine to determine what course would be the right one, or what set of alternatives would be permissible or advisable and what others ruled out.”

My comment: So this second quotation is explaining the two different orders of explanation referred to in the first quotation. The subjectivist starts with the ‘moral sense’ as the place where values are held and then assesses individual value judgments in relation to that; the realist sees the moral sense as a faculty that looks out into our ‘circumstances of choice’ and finds out there ‘facts...that count for and against certain courses of action’. For the subjectivist, values are what we start with; for the realist, what we end with; so, a different order of normative explanation.

I found this view rather bracing; it makes everything more real. It was also nice to read that “The pleasures of sex, food and drink are wonderful, in addition to being adaptive.”[p.120, para. 3] It made me enjoy Christmas more. I am not sure many philosophers would write like this.

Overall on value realism, I suspect I am a bit out of my depth. I have not reached a stage where I can give a cogent summary. It is clearly extremely important to N and may even have driven the whole book in view of his fantastic idea that “ a teleological explanation...would mean that what explains the appearance of life is in part the fact that life is a necessary condition of the instantiation of value, and ultimately of its recognition.” [p.121 2nd para.]

Nietzsche
I think of Nietzsche as a value subjectivist, at least in some of his writings, and so the opposite of Nagel. It is interesting, however, that Nagel quite accepts the subjectivity of some values on p.110, para 2:”Indeed, the disposition to ascribe an illusory objectivity to plainly contingent, response-dependent norms, of language and custom, for example, seems to be typical of humans, and quite useful.” This thought of the usefulness of illusion is an idea I associate with Nietzsche.

Descartes
Nagel speaks much more approvingly of Descartes than Midgley did. This is connected with his view of the super-value of Reason, and of the extreme difference between subjective and objective.

Inspirational
Nagel’s writing occasionally rises to inspirational heights: for example in the idea that life exists in order for value to exist or in this quotation from p.124, para.2:

“The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future - though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge and the choice are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.”

Richard Myers