I think, that even in terms of physics, he is trying to say something. Consider George Ellis' last contest entry on top down causality and how any form of bottom up process will create an equal top down (re)action.

I guess I'm responding to this after searching for a useful term for the dual hemispheres of the brain and considered Julian Jaynes' concept of the bicameral mind, so I googled...

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I think, that even in terms of physics, he is trying to say something. Consider George Ellis' last contest entry on top down causality and how any form of bottom up process will create an equal top down (re)action.

I guess I'm responding to this after searching for a useful term for the dual hemispheres of the brain and considered Julian Jaynes' concept of the bicameral mind, so I googled and reread about it. What a flipping load of hooey. To quote;

"Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1000BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas. Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the "dominant" (left) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" (right) hemisphere (particularly the right temporal cortex), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

Jaynes wrote, "[For bicameral humans], volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey."[1] Jaynes argued that the change from bicamerality to consciousness (linguistic meta-cognition) occurred over a period of ten centuries beginning around 1000 BC. The selection pressure for Jaynesian consciousness as a means for cognitive control is due, in part, to chaotic social disorganizations and the development of new methods of behavioral control such as writing.[citation needed]"

So the ancients deified every rock, river and mountain when they had no concept of consciousness!!!!!!! ERK. The mental flaw that appeared 3000 years ago was monolithic monotheism. A spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell, but it did validate top down authority and that was necessary for empire and eventually global community. Whatever works.

We don't know the source of consciousness, nor do we know the source of biological life. They are obviously related, so either biology came first and consciousness developed later, or there is some form of consciousness pre-existing biology and it manifested in material form, thus causing biological life, or both biological life and the most elemental form of consciousness are different aspects of the same process and came into being together and have evolved together.

Now the popular position among scientific reductionists is the first, yet actually the third would be more reductionistically efficient, since it would involve one mystery, rather than two. It would also help to explain why life is so tenaciously determined to manifest itself wherever possible.

So if we consider the third, then this conscious life form is bootstrapping itself upward through a series of fractal steps and the current situation might well be considered in terms of patterns which have come before, thus there is some "plan." Keep in mind our levels of social and technological complexity, for all we view them as without precedent, are really pale imitations of what biology was developing hundreds of millions of years ago. Government is society's central nervous system, finance is its circulatory system. White blood cells and the immune system in general are a form of policing. The average organism is something like sixty percent bacterial and viral free agents, thus a public(the genetic organism) and private sector. As for technology, have we really surpassed the brain for processing information, or have we just gone for quantity over efficiency and quality?

So that raises the question, what is the "grand plan?" Off hand, it would seem life is trying to turn the planet into a single organism, with humanity as the medium of the central nervous system. Equally obviously we are now only top predator in a collapsing ecosystem, yet that goes back to process. The reset button is about to get pushed in a big way, as we run through the amniotic fluid of oceans of fossil fuels. Will the result that arises be a somewhat more humbled and smarter humanity, one which will start caring for the larger organism, or just more hardened predators? Well, nature does have plenty of failures and false starts. She has eternity to play with. Time will tell.

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A friend of mine recently induced me to consider the arguments Nagel presents in the first chapter of his book.

Here is a copy of my response:

Although I agree with several of his points, I did not find his overall claim or his analysis to be very convincing. For example, his statement on p. 6 that "It is prima facie highly implausible that life..." How has he deduced that it is...

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A friend of mine recently induced me to consider the arguments Nagel presents in the first chapter of his book.

Here is a copy of my response:

Although I agree with several of his points, I did not find his overall claim or his analysis to be very convincing. For example, his statement on p. 6 that "It is prima facie highly implausible that life..." How has he deduced that it is implausible? Most people, including many mathematicians, cannot successfully formulate even simple problems dealing with conditional probabilities, as in the famous Monty Hall Problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_hall_problem So why should we suppose that Nagel can?

In like manner, the Anthropic Principle (that any intelligent observer must, of NECESSITY, look back upon a past history that WAS conducive to his or her existence) is an argument, based on Reduction to Absurdity, that any hypothesis that claims that the a priori probability of life is small, must be absurd, given that the a posteriori probability of life, is known, with certainty, to be identically equal to 1.

Hence, his claim, on page 7, "That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it." is a bit like someone stating that his hypothetical probability analysis has demonstrated that the probability that the sun rose this morning is near zero; But it HAS risen. After the observation of this fact, the conclusion, deduced by the hypothesis, is absurd. Hence, there must be some bad assumptions within the hypothesis.

This bad assumption is reveled on the same page, when he said "dependent only on the laws of chemistry and physics." It is the same bad assumption that most physicists have made. It is not dependent ONLY on the laws. It is also dependent on the initial conditions. It fact, it is so STRONGLY dependent on the fact that the information content of the initial conditions is huge, in comparison to the information content of the laws, that the laws are rendered superfluous; a point I made in an essay submitted to the Foundational Questions Institute 2012 essay contest - http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1372

Nagel goes on to say (page 9) "natural selection cannot account for the actual history without an adequate supply of viable mutations, and I believe it remains an open question whether this could have been provided in geologic time..."

It is not an "open question", that bacteria can generate "viable mutations", to confer drug resistance upon themselves, on a time scale millions of times shorter than "geologic time". Again, his hypothetical probability analysis, is directly contradicted by observational facts.

Rob McEachern

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"Nagel tells us near the outset. "It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.""

"Is it? An evolutionary biologist, at this moment, would interject a salient distinction between terms like "physical accident," as they are commonly misapplied when critiquing natural selection,...

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"Nagel tells us near the outset. "It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.""

"Is it? An evolutionary biologist, at this moment, would interject a salient distinction between terms like "physical accident," as they are commonly misapplied when critiquing natural selection, and the ability of imperfect replicators to conserve those random variations across time that yield selective advantage. I don't share Nagel's view that the latter state of affairs is highly implausible; I find it both illuminating and rather wonderful."

Advantage or disadvantage the result is complex and must have been already potentially existent before the new combination or even the old combination of particles came into existence. You do not get intelligent life from combinations unless it has meaning that reaches beyond that which it came from. You do not get the meaning either before or after for free just because of a comfortable feeling. Illumination about what? Nagle stated the premise wrongly. It is not highly implausible. It is obviously an easily achievable accomplishment for a universe that operates using properties that are not of theoretical physics. Relying upon theoretical physics reduces the plausibility to zero. You have to show the means in your equations. Since you do not know what cause is, you have nothing more than a catalogue of effects. Those effects reach very far beyond the capabilities of the properties of theoretical physics. Intelligent life can neither be predicted by nor explained by theoretical physics. Listing the effects is just listing the effects. There is nothing else, beyond those effects, for you to currently reveal as scientific findings.

"Of what concern are our respective personal intuitions about nature? It is highly implausible that the same yardstick becomes shorter when I throw it than when I hold it in my hand: but there it is."

It is not personal intuition that tells us there must be a cause for the evolution of intelligent life. It is not personal intuition that cause is an unknown to you. Learning effects has made it clear that they are not always the same as we experience. Pointing to length contraction for support in place of predicting intelligent life is a stretch not a contraction.

"Consciousness, cognition, value are simply not explicable--I am speaking now from Nagel's perspective--by psychophysical reductionism, and likely never will be; therefore even physical phenomena cannot ultimately be explained so long as such explanations are based on materialist, reductionist principles. No, the Cosmos as a whole shows far more evidence of something else going on . . . Tielhard De Chardin seems to be in the offing here . . . something as yet unknown . . . but something that is headed *somewhere*, as "principles of the growth of order" in nature are, "in [their] logical form, teleological rather than mechanistic."

"You heard right: Biology is teleological, indeed nature is teleological, clearly assembling itself toward some grand purpose (setting aside that whole "second law of thermodynamics" thing). This is probably the moment that earned Steven Pinker's description of "Mind and Cosmos" as "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.""

Shoddy reasoning for not falling for the unempirically supportable belief that dumbness can evolve into intelligence? Shoddy reasoning for not falling into line with the empirically unsupportable reasoning that the mechanical properties put forward to us by theoretical physics can account for intelligent life?

"(Nagel)"So my speculations about an alternative to physics as a theory of everything do not invoke a transcendent being but tend toward complications to the immanent character of the natural order." (In any event, such a God would be quite unlike the Judeo-Christian version. If anything, Nagel's intuition sounds more like what Gene Rodenberry suspected: that the universe as a whole is gradually growing into a self-consciousness that will, in time, bring itself retroactively into existence.) Rather, Nagel is only intending to lay the groundwork for how a non-materialist future science might be called for in order fully to explain the presence of mind in the order of nature."

Or for a non-materialist future science that might be called for in order to explain the first step, and every step that follows, of the existence of the mind.

"Or, if you like, the presence of nature in the order of mind."

Nature? What is that? Is that your answer for the existence of intelligent life? Nature did it? Lets go back to the beginning. How did Nature do it? This isn't a God question. Feeding the word supernatural back to me will be ineffective. Obviously life is not supernatural nor is its cause. They are what is natural even more than the inventions put forward by theoretical physics to substitute for the unknown nature of cause.

James Putnam

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