WHATSSA MATTER? YOU:

Perhaps even harder than this question of what kind of stuff could become conscious, and therefore what kind of stuff the universe is made of, is the historical question: in the unfolding story of the universe, even if conscious organisms were possible all along, why is it that they actually did arise? Even if consciousness could give an organism an edge over the competition -- a hypothesis that is far from proven -- this would only explain why consciousness stuck around once it arose, and not why it came into being in the first place. It would offer no truly satisfactory explanation for why natural selection should cause material processes to become organisms sufficiently self-aware to know which behavior is to their advantage. After all, it would be of great advantage for a beast, faced with a predator, to be able to dematerialize and rematerialize at some considerable distance, but this advantage would not be sufficient to explain the emergence of this property.

The nature of cognition -- thinking, reasoning, and so forth -- presents an even greater challenge than subjective experience. Notwithstanding the claims of those who ascribe knowledge and thinking to unconscious objects such as computers, Nagel argues that these features are available only to conscious beings. Found most fully in human beings but present in less developed forms in other species, these higher functions of the mind "have enabled us to transcend the perspective of the immediate life-world given to us by our senses and instincts, and to explore the larger objective reality of nature and value." This makes obvious sense: without a ground-floor subjective viewpoint, there cannot be progression to higher-level viewpoints such as that which underpins the objective knowledge of science.

If the nature and existence of basic subjective consciousness cannot be fully explained through evolutionary theory, then neither can the higher cognitive functions, regardless of any putative survival advantage they may ultimately confer. There is, moreover, a problem in trying to envisage a process of natural selection generating creatures like ourselves that have the capacity, as Nagel puts it, "to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances." It is strange that such a capacity should have been produced by natural selection, given that the advantages it has brought have been fully realized only in theoretical pursuits which are relatively new. Just how strange this is becomes evident if we accept -- as many evolutionary psychologists do -- the "truths" in question do not correspond to anything constitutive of the natural world. If reason, knowledge, and thought are merely devices to improve our chances of survival, then it is appropriate to adopt an anti-realistic view of what they tell us about the world. Scientists, like the rest of us, would have to define "truth" as whatever set of beliefs happen to be of adaptive value -- regardless of whether they are, well, true. This makes it difficult to understand how they could gradually build up to the great theoretical edifices of natural science that have huge scope and immense explanatory, predictive, and practical power.

Consider, for example, the words of British political philosopher and celebrity misanthrope John Gray. In his diatribe against humanism, Straw Dogs (2003), Gray argued that the belief that "through science humankind can know the truth" is a mere article of faith -- and one that is ill-founded, as Darwin has taught us that "the human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. To think otherwise is to resurrect the pre-Darwinian error that humans are different from all other animals." Unlike Gray, Nagel is able to see the self-contradiction in this claim: The theory put forward by the bearded, upright primate Charles Darwin would have demonstrated itself to be groundless -- a consequence that could be considered ironic were it not logically impossible.

This part of Nagel's case is closely connected with his discussion of the final defining feature of consciousness that cannot be accommodated by scientific naturalism: value -- our sense of what is good and what is bad, and our judgment of right and wrong. He critiques a different type of subjectivism, the one which holds that moral and value judgments of all kinds can be traced to natural, adaptive responses of attraction and aversion to pleasurable and painful experiences. Against this view, Nagel upholds a kind of moral realism which views our value judgments as attempts, however error-prone, to apprehend real truths about the world, just as mathematics attempts to discern real logical truths and science aims to uncover real empirical truths. Even if one does not accept the notion that value judgments have "truth," there remains the awkward fact that they are explicit, argued over, and associated with the idea of unassailable validity -- not characteristics one associates with the material world as described by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology.

For all these reasons, Nagel rejects not only theories of consciousness that reduce it to the brain, but ones that reduce it to the sum of purely accidental physical processes played out across a grand time scale. This claim leads him into dangerous territory; he questions whether we have any theoretical framework from which we can understand how life arose out of chemical elements by purely physical processes, and (even more dangerous) whether the emergence of complex, not to mention conscious, organisms can be accounted for by natural selection.

This willingness to court danger, and execration by the materialist mainstream, is made more admirable by the fact that Nagel has no hidden agenda: Although he seems to be flirting with Intelligent Design and (God help us) theism, he is careful to note both his own atheism and the failings of design theory.

Instead, Nagel toys with a non-theistic, non-intentional, yet teleological hypothesis for the existence of life, mind, and value. A truly complete theory of mind, he suggests, would have to account for how the proto-mental character of the basic stuff of the universe played a role in the generation of the full-scale minds we see today -- how, in a sense, mind created its own higher manifestations. Similarly, the existence of value ought to be explored not just as an accidental side effect of life, but as the thing that life was brought about in order to realize or apprehend: "there is life because life is a necessary condition of value."

This hypothesis, of course, is at odds with the Darwinian picture and the naturalism it seems to license. Indeed, this notion that life, consciousness, and value are determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but by a cosmic disposition to form them, is a radical break with the predominant mindset of the entire scientific establishment. According to this orthodoxy, consciousness is a definite parvenu, and value a precarious new kid on the block. It will take some overturning -- and so it should. After all, the Darwinian view seems to be supported by some fundamental truths: that matter must have preceded living matter, that living matter seemingly must have preceded conscious living matter, and that likewise conscious living matter preceded morally fastidious conscious living matter. And the assumptions with which this view begins have of course contributed to many of the great scientific advances of the last few centuries.

Nagel is aware that in the present intellectual climate any discussion of a teleological hypothesis is unlikely to be taken seriously, notwithstanding the fact that we are far from having any idea of the kind of processes that could possibly have given rise to life out of nonliving matter, conscious life out of living matter, or conscientious life out of conscious life. Even so, the fact that even a respected naturalistic luminary like Francis Crick asserted that life seems miraculous -- so much so that he was willing to entertain the theory (also taken seriously by many other famous scientists) that life on earth was seeded by showers of unicellular organisms deliberately sent by an advanced civilization from elsewhere -- does not help Nagel's case as much as he seems to think. Even Homer nods.

The standard belief that we are unimportant events generated by an entirely absentminded universe commands wide, if insincere, acceptance. Stephen Hawking's declaration that "the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies" is more often quoted than challenged. Just the same, Nagel concludes with a confident prediction "that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two."

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