* Dualism, the belief that there's more to the mind than the action of neurons -- with the associated belief that the mind is beyond the reach of science, possibly forever -- is an antiquated idea that stubbornly refuses to die, despite its lack of substance. Creationists are particular opponents of cognitive pragmatism, dressing up their dubious arguments under the guise of "non-materialistic neuroscience". It's never amounted to much, but the underlying doctrine has been echoed by respectable scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel -- if not to much effect.
* The idea that a machine could have a mind, could think, could be conscious, tends to upset people, with people sometimes outraged at the suggestion. They similarly often proclaim that "science will never understand the mind". It's the same issue, really; if the mind can't be scientifically nailed down, then obviously we will never build a machine that honestly has a mind. It's an inversion of the Turing rule.
It should be warned that attempting to answer the many objections that people raise to pragmatic cognitive science is to run down dead-end streets, again and again. Unfortunately, the objections won't go away if they're ignored. Turing, as shown above, didn't ignore them, attempting to address in his 1950 essay objections to the possibility of a thinking machine -- and by implication, the "explicable mind", a mind understood by science -- going to considerable lengths in doing so. Near the top of the list was what he called the "head in the sand" objection:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
The consequences of machines thinking would be too dreadful. Let us hope and believe that they cannot do so.
END_QUOTE
In this case, Turing did not feel any need for refutation, there being nothing there to refute. All it amounted to was: "I don't like the idea!" -- to which the sensible reply was: "Don't, then; nobody says you must." Turing added that this objection was not usually phrased in such a direct fashion. Somewhat more specifically, Turing presented the "theological argument":
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.
END_QUOTE
This is no more a rehash of the insistence of spiritualists on dualism, and remains of no interest to the sciences -- asking: "Will a thinking machine have a soul?" To which the obvious reply would be: "No, of course not. Next question?" Spiritualists, incidentally, may not recognize this reply as ironic.
Turing, however, chose to take the question at face value, much as Hume would have, to show it led to absurd conclusions. If the soul wasn't really an essential component of the human body -- that is, if we could have zombies, somehow rendered devoid of awareness by the absence of a soul -- and the soul was infused into the body by the will of the Deity, then why would He refuse to grant a soul to a worthy mechanical body? If He could do so, why would He refuse to? As Turing put it:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
In attempting to construct such machines, we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
END_QUOTE
Having been given a silly question, Turing replied with a silly answer. Nonetheless, modern-day creationists, AKA evolution deniers, are fond of belaboring this issue, as a facet to their attacks on evolutionary science. It may seem like "poisoning the well" to lump dualism with creationism -- but the two are closely related, creationists insisting that there cannot be an explicable mind, since it could then be produced by evolution; and since evolution is untrue, then there cannot be an explicable mind. Creationists, it should be noted, say such things to prove they have absolutely no sense of humor.
In addition, creationism is predicated on the efforts of an unseen agent -- in the tired phrase, an "Intelligent Designer" -- in the origins of the Earth's species of organisms. Dualism is similarly predicated on an unseen agent, Harvey the homunculus, with creationists insisting that Harvey could only be the product of another unseen agent, the Intelligent Designer.
Creationists are inclined to vehemence in their dualism. As a prominent example, consider Dr. Michael Egnor, an American neurosurgeon, professor of pediatrics, and notably vocal creationist. In 2009, the US National Public Radio discussed a debate between Egnor and Dr. Steven Novella -- a neurologist, professor at Yale University, and well-known skeptical blogger -- with Egnor, of course, taking the dualist side, and Novella taking the pragmatic side. Novella said the evidence for pragmatism is "overwhelming", pointing out:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
If you change the brain, you change the mind. If you damage the brain, you damage the mind. If you turn off the brain, you turn off the mind. And now with more sophisticated tools, when we're looking at brain function with functional MRI, for example, we can see that brain activity precedes mental activities -- and that makes sense, because causes come before their effects.
END_QUOTE
Egnor replied:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
There is nothing about neurons that scientifically would lead you to infer consciousness from them. They're masses of gelatinous carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, just like other kinds of flesh. And why would flesh have first-person experience? So, even logically, it doesn't hang together.
END_QUOTE
This was nothing more than the distribution fallacy of Leibniz, very much like saying that since individual atoms aren't alive, then an organism made up of atoms can't be alive, either. It was an argument of incredulity, with Egnor simply asserting that mere biology can't produce consciousness, without being able to produce some Harvey the homunculus that can actually do the job -- in exactly the same way that Egnor could say nothing specific about his Intelligent Designer. Novella said in response:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
The brain uses energy, it can hold information, it can communicate, it can receive sensory input. It can even activate itself and create a loop of ongoing activity. [The brain] can do things that can plausibly cause consciousness and self-awareness, so the argument really just falls on its face.
END_QUOTE
Egnor claimed there was evidence of mental activity in people who didn't have brain function:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
The person was able to have mental processes during a time when they were in cardiac arrest, in cardiac standstill, and sometimes even absent EEG waves. So I think there is very real scientific evidence that the mind in some circumstances can exist without a functioning brain.
END_QUOTE
Susan Blackmore and others have conducted research on claims along such lines, to find the evidence ambiguous at best, blatantly fabricated at worst, and in no case proving reliably replicable.
One of Egnor's most confusing arguments against cognitive pragmatism was the tale of the "Verizon deniers", in which he postulated the existence of a technologically sophisticated society, living on an island, that does not know about the existence of wireless communications. One day, a box floats on the shore, containing a smartphone. The scientists on the island examine the smartphone to hear voices coming from it.
The only conclusion they can come to, being blind to wireless communications, is that the phone was generating the voices itself. However, a skeptic among them wonders how it would be possible to get a meaningful conversation out of the smartphone -- with Egnor triumphantly proclaiming that couldn't be done, since "meaning is not a property of matter". The only way to explain the generation of "meaning" by the phone is by pointing out it really is a receiver, since it can't generate the "meaning" itself.
This was another of Egnor's arguments of incredulity, asserting that since "meaning" isn't a measureable quantity, then it can only be produced by mysterious magical means -- Harvey, Intelligent Designer, invisible gremlins, whatever. The first thing that can be said in response is that all conversations with KITT are meaningful. In fact, they're more meaningful than typical human conversations, since they're strictly business, the business of driving, with no wool-gathering.
KITT says little or nothing that doesn't need to be said, that isn't realistic and informative. Alice would be annoyed with him if he didn't stay on mission and gave uninformative answers. KITT generates "meaning" every time he opens his electronic mouth. There's no mystery about anything KITT does, since all his components and software are necessarily documented, in full detail, to permit his manufacture and debugging. We can understand KITT as well as we can a mechanical clock, the only issue being that KITT has far more parts. Yes, we may not know exactly how KITT reacts in every real-world circumstance, but we can certainly know there are things he can't and won't do, like say, at least without being told to: "I think, therefore I am."
If Egnor were to then make a fuss over the fact that KITT doesn't know or care about anything but driving, then we could ask the good doctor to disprove the Turing rule -- to propose any topic, and prove that a machine couldn't be built to discuss it. There's nothing to stop us from building a machine that could, say, discuss politics. The trick is, of course, that nobody would do so, except as a gag. It wouldn't necessarily be hard to do, since political discussions tend towards mindless ranting anyway.
It might be more interesting to build a machine to tell jokes. There is no obstacle to building a neural network to generate jokes by skewed association of word phrases, guided by a knowledge base derived from jokes, ranked according to their popularity. Most of the machine's jokes would be duds, but by chance a few of them would likely be zingers -- meaningful, people laugh, people get the joke. Given enough time and a big enough knowledge base, the machine would become ever more adept at coming up with jokes. GAI chatbots have been used to generate jokes, but so far they've been very poor at it. They are likely to get better.
Of course, we could easily build a machine to impersonate a creationist. It could be done by a simple chatbot that parroted creationist arguments, ignoring all replies, and it would sound convincingly like Egnor. The Uncanny Valley is not an obstacle when the people being impersonated are hard to tell from poorly-designed machines.
BACK_TO_TOP* Egnor's confused notions of "meaning" are not out of character; he is fond of "arguments of immaterials", based on confusingly-defined terms, as shown in one of his comments as cited by Novella:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Acceptance of free will and intentionality is a precondition for any meaningful discussion of reality. Strictly materialistic neuroscience is nonsense, because it inherently denies the existence of free will and of intentionality ...
END_QUOTE
As mentioned earlier, the term "free will" has long suffered from failures of definition; Egnor's claim that neuroscience was incompatible with free will was based on a personalized definition of free will -- in which the only thing that was clear in it, was that free will was defined as incompatible with neuroscience. Anyone who was unwise enough to question that assertion would be dragged through the thornbrush indefinitely. As for intentionality, a can opener has intentionality, and it was nonsense to say neuroscience denies its existence. As noted previously, intentionality has a way of popping back up in the discussion of cognition, if not always in a good way.
In much the same way, Egnor has tried to make much of the immaterial nature of information, ideas, thoughts, and so on. In the case of information, he less failed than refused to realize that all manifestations of information are material; if all encodings of a certain specific information -- printed text, bits in a computer memory, synaptic connections in the brain -- were wiped, that information would cease to exist. Information is not a "thing in itself", instead being no more or less than the content of a communications channel or data storage device, such as a broadcast radio channel, an internet connection, a book, a map, a flash stick, memories in a brain. Destroy the things storing or carrying the information, the information disappears. It's entirely material.
Egnor might as well have tried to proclaim the immaterial nature of calculations by a pocket calculator. Human beings can do simple calculations in their heads -- trained in childhood with drills of addition and multiplication, plus indoctrination with rules of arithmetic procedures -- and so calculations can be seen as equivalent to thoughts, if of a narrowly specific sort; but it would then be a remarkable leap to conclude that there was anything mysterious about the operation of a pocket calculator.
A pocket calculator performs calculations by shuttling electrical signals through logic gates; the human brain performs calculations by neural discharges routed though a massive neural net. Of course, Egnor doesn't believe that neural discharges are adequate to explain the mind, insisting that some sort of Harvey has to be involved -- but he has no more realistic way to show what Harvey is up to, than he has to show that there is more to the operation of a pocket calculator than the workings of logic gates.
Yet another example of Egnor's bafflegab was a claim that altruism was immaterial, and so was, of course, beyond science. The reality is that altruism is no more or less than an intentionality, manifested as a behavior pattern. We could in principle build machines that are altruistic, for example a robot medic, single-mindedly dedicated to the aid of humans -- just as certainly as we could build machines that are single-mindedly non-altruistic, malign, like terminator robots.
* Returning to Egnor's "Verizon deniers" story, the scenario was torturously contrived to begin with. Suppose the island were inhabited by members of a pre-technical society. If they were to come onto a smartphone and hear voices come out of it, they might assume it was a god, or a conduit to a god, possibly named Harvey.
If the islanders were members of a technological society, it is preposterous to think they could examine the smartphone and not notice that it had features associated with wireless communications, like an antenna. How could they understand everything else about the smartphone, but not notice its communications elements? At the very least, they would notice components whose function they did not understand.
Most importantly, they would also be able to test the theory that it was a communications device -- for example, taking it into a deep cave to see if it went quiet, or traveling off the island to see if they could find transmitter stations. Who knows? They might even think to talk to people via the smartphone to get clues. Egnor, in contrast:
Novella, with masochistic persistence, has had running clashes with Egnor over the years, noting such declarations by Egnor as: "the assertion that the brain stores memories is logical nonsense" -- which Novella found a wild thing for a neurosurgeon, it appears a highly competent one, to say -- along with an exercise in runaway paranoia:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Ultimately, perhaps massive defunding of organized science, and a new system of support for research that demands utter transparency and maximal accommodation of debate, may be the only way to defend ourselves from an utterly corrupt scientific elite.
END_QUOTE
That was a revealing statement -- in that Egnor acknowledged, in a backwards way, that his ideas were not taken seriously by, or even generally known to, the people who did worthwhile scientific research for a living. His reaction to this evident fact was not to wonder if he were out of his depth, but to instead propose that the research community be bullied into accepting his ideas. Fortunately Egnor, as always, could not and did not suggest any realistic way by which such bullying might take place, and had no chance of seeing it happen.
Egnor, in sum, throws out argument after argument, brushing off or ignoring refutations, simply contriving yet another argument when one is shot full of holes -- with, as his various arguments of immaterials demonstrate, new arguments often being cosmetic variants of earlier ones -- until it becomes obvious that he's just making stuff up, and discussion with him is useless.
Egnor's attacks on cognitive science are just another part of his creationist bag of tricks -- and all creationism consists of is endless complaints, with nothing more to say for itself than: SOME UNSEEN AGENT OR OTHER (PICK ANY YOU LIKE) DID IT BY UNKNOWN MEANS. It's like explaining lightning by invoking Thor, the Thunder God, smashing his hammer. It has been said that arguing with a creationist is like playing chess with a pigeon: the bird knocks over the pieces, dirties the playing board, and then flies to the top of a flagpole to proclaim what a winner it is.
BACK_TO_TOP* Egnor is perfectly free to reject the sciences, there being no law to stop him from doing so, nobody even contemplating such a law; but nobody has good reason to pay any attention to him, either. David Gorski -- an oncologist, like Novella a skeptical blogger, Gorski going by the "nom de blog" of "Orac" -- once described Egnor as the "Energizer Bunny" of creationism, going and going and going while noisily pounding on a drum. That being the case, then why bother with Egnor here? At the very least, it seems tiresome and pointless.
The reality is that there is a lot of nonsense in popular circulation on cognitive science, of the "not even wrong" variety, and it all comes together in Egnor and others, generally creationists, who advocate a "non-materialistic neuroscience". While this exercise is of course partly driven by the insistence on the existence of an immortal soul -- an idea that may be freely allowed, if on the basis that it's irrelevant to the sciences -- more formally, Egnor and those like him choose to attack "materialism", or the redundant "materialistic science".
The sciences, of course, are materialistic by definition. The sciences work to comprehend the natural laws of the material Universe through observation, modeling, and experiment. Granting that science is materialistic, and no reputable scientist would say different, that leads to the question of why that is supposed to be a problem -- and to the work of philosopher Thomas Nagel, mentioned earlier.
Nagel is a highly respected figure, and his work, unlike that of Egnor, is entitled to civil consideration. Nagel's best-recognized work in the field of cognition is his 1974 essay "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" It starts by stating the "mind-body problem is intractable", to then dismiss "reductionist euphoria", and zero in on the "subjective character of experience" -- stating: "Without some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory."
Nagel used as an example for his essay, as its title implies, bats:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision.
But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat.
END_QUOTE
Nagel concluded that "physicalism" -- really the same as Egnor's "materialism" -- is useless for understanding the subjective experience of a bat, and there is no basis for achieving an objective understanding of the mind of a bat, and no way to bridge the mind-body problem.
The difficulties with Nagel's essay starts with the title: "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" It is misleading, a title more apt to Nagel's argument being: "Can You Be A Bat?" OK, the immediate and final answer to that is: NO. To which the counter-question is: "So what?"
The title of the essay merely asks what it is like to be a bat. Can we know what it would be like to be, say, Abraham Lincoln? We can't be him, of course, but we can get an excellent idea of what it would be like to be Lincoln, by reading a good biography of him, as well as his speeches and other documents -- he was an impressively articulate man. It's as close as we can get to obtaining a download of his mind.
The study of Lincoln can be thought of as "historical heterophenomenology" -- really only differing from heterophenomenology in general in that we can't ask Lincoln any questions. That's not such a big deal, since we have plenty of observations, many corroborated, of Lincoln's behavior, and Lincoln's own articulations of his thoughts. In fact, such materials teach us everything about Lincoln that we really care about. We might also learn that he had headaches or indigestion on occasion, or his feet were sore at one time or another, but who cares about that? Similarly, the exact text of the famous address Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863 is unlikely to have precisely the same wording as the one passed down to posterity in the records, but nobody cares about that, either.
Those are what Dennett calls "inert historical facts", uninteresting and irrelevant; they can be more informally categorized as "rivet counting". Biographers are inclined to belabor such trivia, but primarily in the interests of establishing that they have been thorough in their research; we can assume that such mundane things happened to Lincoln, and not concern ourselves with them further. After all, what we're really interested in is his conduct, his character, and above all his leadership.
The closest anyone could get to being Lincoln is an actor playing him in a movie -- for example, Daniel Day-Lewis (born 1957) in the 2012 movie LINCOLN, where the audience generally found the actor's performance convincing, and for which Day-Lewis won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2013.
How much weight can we really place on an actor's pretense of being a person who nobody among the living ever saw, and who was never recorded on audio or video? For that reason, as much as we like; as long as the performance is consistent with everything we know about Lincoln from robust historical research, nobody could find fault, or sensibly ask for more. If the performance may not be perfectly accurate in all specifics, nobody would make much of a fuss about it, instead accepting that the actor provided as reasonable a facsimile, a model, of Lincoln as might be had.
Sure, we can know what it's like to be Abraham Lincoln, no problem. Why should it be more troublesome to know what it's like to be a bat? Dennett has suggested that Nagel chose a bat for the topic of his essay because humans are not very familiar with bats, Nagel himself saying they are alien beings. Cats wouldn't have been so convenient to Nagel's case. If Alice, who keeps a tomcat named Sam, were asked: "What's it like to be a cat?" -- she would reply: "I have a very good idea of what it's like to be a cat."
Alice knows Sam's moods, whims, and habits perfectly well; she has little trouble predicting the cat's behavior. For example, Alice knows Sam can't resist chasing in futility after the red dot produced by a laser pen, and that he hides under the bed when she runs the vacuum cleaner. Alice doesn't know, but doesn't need to know, what's going on in the cat's head beyond what she has observed of how he behaves.
Cats can have guile, but not so much, and Alice doesn't have much trouble reading Sam's intentions. If Alice annoys him, he swishes its tail, or hisses if very annoyed; if he's content, he purrs; if he's hungry and is begging to be fed, he meows and rubs against her legs -- yowling if she accidentally steps on one of his little paws. She can't get any explanations from him on why he does something, but why would she ask? His behavior gives Alice all the heterophenomenological leverage into his mind she needs. If he pesters her about being fed, obviously he's hungry; if he runs from the vacuum cleaner in panic, obviously he's frightened by the noise. "What you see is what you get."
In Australia, people keep adorable little "sugar gliders" -- something like Down-Under flying squirrels, though they're marsupials, not rodents -- as pets, and become very close to them. They have more similarities to bats than cats, being more the size of bats; coming out at night; eating insects; and capable of flying, or at least gliding. Anatomically, bats are more like cats than they are like sugar gliders. If we kept bats for pets, or raised them like we do pigeons, we'd likely get a good idea of what they were like, too.
Except for zoo exhibits, we don't keep bats, there being little practical reason to do so, while few find them adorable. However, we've learned something about bat behavior, and they're not completely alien. Consider a tale of a night in the life of a bat:
BEGIN_TEXT:
The bat named Boris was sleeping soundly. Of course, he didn't know anything about the name "Boris", since bats don't have much or any concept of words, but it's useful to give him a handle for narrative purposes. Although parasites tend to infest bat roosts, none were so active on him as to disturb his rest.
With the fall of darkness, the roost began to stir, with the cries of bats growing to a small cacophony. Boris paid it little mind; all he knew was that he was hungry, and it was time to hunt. He dropped from his sleeping position and flew into the night, easily evading the other bats flying around him.
Although Boris wasn't blind by any means, his vision was primarily for navigating, allowing him to avoid large obstacles and orient himself in the terrain around his roost. When he flew near a power pole, he couldn't see the cables strung from one pole to another, but he knew they were there, having had a near-collision in the past. He gave no thought as to what the power poles were, or why they were there, nor did he realize that breaking a wing in collision with one of them was certain to be fatal; he just didn't like running into things, because it hurt.
His primary sense was his keen hearing, which not only allowed him to spot large obstacles from their acoustic reflections, but also listen for potential threats. A noticeable rustle of wings might be an owl or some other threat; when presented with such a threat, he took evasive action, though he might not know what the particular threat was. Given a threat, he just got away from it. If the threat persisted, he was small, and could find someplace to hide.
Boris was capable of spotting the glow of a streetlight, and knew from experience he was likely to find moths and other meals in its light. On investigating, he found the hunting good, using chirps to target the moths with sonar. He could discriminate the moths from buzzing targets that he knew might have stingers; experience had taught him they weren't good to eat.
Boris was eating his fill when another bat arrived -- not from his roost, he didn't recognize its cries, but there was enough to eat for him to have no concern for the intruder. However, still others arrived, and the competition became annoying, more work for less reward. Boris, not being a particularly aggressive bat, decided to try his luck elsewhere. He didn't find such a rich haul anywhere else, but the hunting wasn't bad, either.
And so it went through the night. Boris's life might have seemed unfulfilling to a human; but he cared nothing about fulfillment, he just wanted a full stomach. He had to eat as much as he could, since he would spend the winter months in hibernation, without food -- but he still just wanted to eat, having little or no concept of planning for the future.
As the light of dawn began to grow in the east, Boris called it a night, to head back to the comfort of the roost. There, after some jostling for position, he wrapped himself up, hanging by his rear feet, and went back to sleep for the day.
END_TEXT
Notice that this essay is a third-person description of the first-person experience of being a bat, driving straight down the road of Dennett's heterophenomenology, applied to animals. There's no difficulty in taking a third-person point of view of a first-person experience with a bat, since a bat cannot produce a first-person narrative. It's not a question of ignorance of the language of bats; they don't have a language, at least not above a set of cries and calls. If we know the behavior of bats and observe the reactions of a bat, we know the general operations of its mind, in the same way that we know how the Alien Attack game works.
In any case, what more could we say that was interesting about Boris? Yes, we could learn more details about the behavior of bats, but the story would read much the same; it would just go on for longer, until it got too nitpicky and boring to read, bogged down in inert details. Nagel, in effect, claims the tale of Boris misses the qualia, the frames of the Cartesian theater, in the bat's mind -- but there isn't a Cartesian theater there, just neural activity that we can trace with the right gear, but no more actually "see" than we can see a radio wave.
An animal neuropsychologist named Dr. Mary Bates took Nagel's question at face value, asking herself in the course of her studies: "Very well, what would it be like to be a bat?" She never thought it was an intractable question, writing the gentlest rebuke to Nagel in 2012:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
What was it like to be a bat? What is it like to perform aerial acrobatics, live most of your life in complete darkness, and acquire nearly all of your information about the world from echoes bouncing off objects and back to your ears?
END_QUOTE
In her studies, Bates learned about things we actually could know about what it was like to be a bat; or a seal; or an octopus. All these animals had senses that could be understood, showing how they perceived the world around them, and had behaviors that revealed under careful examination the workings of their animal minds. We can know more about what it's like to be a bat than we can know about what it would be like to be Lincoln, since a bat has much less sophisticated behaviors than Lincoln did.
Nagel, confronted with the bat mind, simply threw up his hands, and said we could know nothing essential about it -- not even invoking some sort of Harvey the homunculus. What, nothing? Bates, in contrast, wondered what useful questions could be asked, and then worked on means of answering them. In essence, Nagel was saying: "Science cannot answer this question." -- with the effective reply from Bates: "You don't know how to ask the right questions."
Nagel is what is sometimes called a "mysterian". This is a sort of dualism -- that is, Nagel thinks the workings of PONs can't be the sole operational basis of the mind, that there must be something else involved. However, not only can he not tell us what it is, he says we have no way of knowing what it is. In short, it is not so much that Nagel is asking the wrong question, he's not asking a real question at all, flatly stating in advance that he won't, can't, get an answer.
BACK_TO_TOP* To a degree, Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be A Bat" was a diversion since, as his failure to ask penetrating questions about the mind of a bat makes clear, he wasn't very interested in the lives of bats. His target was materialism AKA physicalism. This was most apparent in his 2012 book MIND & COSMOS, modestly subtitled: "Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False". In essence, the book claimed that evolution, at least as conceived at present by the sciences, had to be off the mark, since it could not account for the mind.
Why not? Because, as he said in his earlier essay, the mind-body problem is intractable. That's true, but that's only a problem for those who insist on manufacturing it into one. By definition, an intractable question yields an immediate conclusion: "That's unanswerable." It is then a silly prank to come back with: "Aha! I have you stumped! You lose!" This is along the lines of putting a bag over one's own head, and claiming to hoodwink everyone else.
It is difficult to figure out who the target audience for MIND & COSMOS was supposed to be. The book certainly wasn't of interest to the general public; although the book was enthusiastically received by the creationist community, it barely showed up on the radar of the science community, the few scientists who bothered to read it judging it as nothing more than talking in circles -- much to the wrath of Nagel's admirers.
Wrath or not, it was still just talking in circles. The sciences are strictly based on the evidence of observation and experiment. No scientific model amounts to anything more or less than a system for linking careful observations to verifiable results. Nagel could not, did not try to, present reliable evidence that demonstrated any difficulty with scientific research, his case being expressed as: "You can't get from HERE to THERE." With the reply: "Your concepts of HERE and THERE are nonsensical."
The fact that creationists liked MIND & COSMOS might have seemed a bit ironic, since Nagel is an atheist -- except for the fact that, in a public review, Nagel endorsed SIGNATURE IN THE CELL by Stephen C. Meyer as the "2009 book of the year". The book was an "Intelligent Design" screed, being judged baloney and then some by the few honest scientists who held their noses and read it. Its focus was on the creationist "abiogenesis" argument -- that is, the origins of life on Earth are completely beyond explanation by science, and so obvious evidence of "Intelligent Design". This is a weary creationist "argument of ignorance", featuring two components:
This is an inference that only makes sense to creationists, who remain oblivious to the fact that their conclusion, even if accepted, is completely lacking in specifics, and explains nothing.
Meyer achieved this "proof" by a "cooked" analysis of the work of scientists performing abiogenesis research. Of course, none of these scientists believed abiogenesis was a problem they could never solve, since they were continuing their research; and if Meyer got in touch with them to tell them about the "fatal flaw" he had discovered in their work, obviously they didn't see his argument as persuasive. Dennett, in a "spirited" correspondence with Nagel following the review, concluded that Nagel had endorsed Meyer's book without bothering to ask the abiogenesis research community what they thought of it.
By proclaiming that evolution couldn't deal with the mind-body "problem", MIND & COSMOS established a strong connection between creationism and dualism. The irony was that, having proclaimed that science can't "eff the ineffable", as the saying goes, Nagel then spun around to propose a way it could be done -- using a concept that he called "natural teleology", stating there were undiscovered properties in nature that could, for example, drive the emergence of consciousness. This mindset is sometimes called "property dualism".
The term "natural teleology" sounds suspiciously like "elan vital", or "vitalism", the dusty old claim that there was some sort of "life force" that kept organisms alive. It's an ancient notion, common among the world's traditional cultures, not so different from belief in the immortal soul, and it lingers in modern pop culture. Indeed, the immortal soul can be seen as the same as the life force. Why not? One intangible looks exactly like another -- they don't look like anything at all.
The elaboration of chemistry in the 20th century showed that life was entirely due to biochemistry; altering the biochemistry of organisms alters their functioning, and when the biochemistry of an organism goes seriously wrong, the organism dies. Life is a system property, being no more or less than the collective behavior of an elaborate, intricately structured, and interacting set of biomolecules, none of which can be regarded as alive in themselves. Vitalism was meaningless, explaining nothing.
In the same way, there is nothing in Nagel's "natural teleology" that can be proven or disproven by the evidence, and it is just as useless as vitalism. What truly brings Nagel's argument around in a circle is that Dennett, a formidable advocate of evolutionary science, agrees there is a "natural teleology" -- but he identifies it as "Darwinian teleology", rightly claiming the Darwinian evolutionary concept fully able to account for all the features of life on Earth, including the mind.
Dennett calls evolution a "universal acid" that eats through anything that attempts to contain it; and there was nothing in MIND & COSMOS that presented any competition to it. In his writings, Dennett compares evolution to a "crane" -- a device that is very well understood, nothing mysterious or magical about it -- while creationism invokes a "skyhook" -- a hook magically descended from the clouds, capable of lifting anything, with no visible means of support.
Dennett calls the search for skyhooks "hysterical realism". Humans have a strong tendency to believe in skyhooks, insisting on transcending the obstacles, real or imagined, presented by the material world by dreaming up a "super power" of some sort. The fact that the super power can't be nailed down isn't a problem, in fact it's the point of the exercise, since it wouldn't be a transcendent super power if it could be. Hence the popularity of superhero comics or videos, and more generally miracles, magic, and psi powers -- in which what is, by all material evidence, impossible, is claimed to be achievable, simply because it would be really great if it's true, and nobody can prove it isn't.
Nagel, judging the Darwinian crane inadequate, invokes the skyhook of "natural teleology" that could, by invoking a super power that he doesn't even pretend to nail down, do what he claims can't happen. In reality, Nagel is playing a "bait & switch", dismissing the materialistic SOMETHING, then trying to beat it with a NOTHING. In absence of any tangible linkage to the real world, Nagel can come up with anything he likes, and it's just as good as he wants it to be -- one skyhook works as well, or poorly, as another. As Hume put it:
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... if men attempt the discussion of questions which lie entirely beyond the reach of human capacity, such as those concerning the origin of worlds, or the economy of the intellectual system or region of spirits, they may long beat the air in their fruitless contests, and never arrive at any determinate conclusion.
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Nagel didn't even get as specific as that, and did nothing but "beat the air". MIND & COSMOS went nowhere, giving no support to his assertion that the Darwinian world-view -- and by implication, cognitive pragmatism -- are "almost certainly false". Nagel invested considerable effort into creating a pretty package wrapped with silver paper and tied up with gold ribbon, that had nothing inside of it. The only thing good that can be said about the book is that it is unlikely to have a sequel.
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