Thomas Nagel

(1937-)

Thomas Nagel opposes attempts to "reduce" consciousness and mental actions to

material explanations.

Like Peter Strawson, he is concerned about "objective" accounts of mind that try to view a
mind externally. He holds that the internal or subjective view contains an irreducible
element without which we lose the autonomous agent.

I think the only solution is to regard action as a basic mental or more accurately psychophysical category
— reducible neither to physical nor to other mental terms. Action has its own irreducibly internal aspect
as do other psychological phenomena — there is a characteristic mental asymmetry between awareness
of one's own actions and awareness of the actions of others — but action isn't anything else, alone or in
combination with a physical movement: not a sensation, not a feeling, not a belief, not an intention or
desire. If we restrict our palette to such things plus physical events, agency will be omitted from our
picture of the world.

But even if we add it as an irreducible feature, making subjects of experience also subjects of action, the
problem of free action remains. We may act without being free, and we may doubt the freedom of others
without doubting that they act. What undermines the sense of freedom doesn't automatically undermine
agency.

(The View from Nowhere, p.111)

Nagel discusses the problem of free will only indirectly, in the context of autonomy
and responsibility, given the hypothesis of determinism.
What I shall discuss are two aspects of the problem of free will, corresponding to the two ways in which
objectivity threatens ordinary assumptions about human freedom. I call one the problem of autonomy
and the other the problem of responsibility; the first presents itself initially as a problem about our own
freedom and the second as a problem about the freedom of others. An objective view of actions as
events in the natural order (determined or not) produces a sense of impotence and futility with respect to
what we do ourselves. It also undermines certain basic attitudes toward all agents—those reactive
attitudes (see Strawson (Freedom and Resentment)) that are conditional on the attribution of
responsibility. It is the second of these effects that is usually referred to as the problem of free will. But
the threat to our conception of our own actions — the sense that we are being carried along by the
universe like small pieces of flotsam — is equally important and equally deserving of the title. The two
are connected. The same external view that poses a threat to my own autonomy also threatens my
sense of the autonomy of others, and this in turn makes them come to seem inappropriate objects of
admiration and contempt, resentment and gratitude, blame and praise.

Like other basic philosophical problems, the problem of free will is not in the first instance verbal. It is not
a problem about what we are to say about action, responsibility, what someone could or could not have
done, and so forth. It is rather a bafflement of our feelings and attitudes — a loss of confidence,
conviction or equilibrium. Just as the basic problem of epistemology is not whether we can be said to
know things, but lies rather in the loss of belief and the invasion of doubt, so the problem of free will lies
in the erosion of interpersonal attitudes and of the sense of autonomy. Questions about what we are to
say about action and responsibility merely attempt after the fact to express those feelings — feelings of
impotence, of imbalance, and of affective detachment from other people. These forms of unease are
familiar once we have encountered the problem of free will through the hypothesis of determinism. We
are undermined but at the same time ambivalent, because the unstrung attitudes don't disappear: they
keep forcing themselves into consciousness despite their loss of support. A philosophical treatment of
the problem must deal with such disturbances of the spirit, and not just with their verbal expression.
I change my mind about the problem of free will every time I think about it, and therefore cannot offer any
view with even moderate confidence; but my present opinion is that nothing that might be a solution has
yet been described. This is not a case where there are several possible candidate solutions and we don't
know which is correct. It is a case where nothing believable has (to my knowledge) been proposed by
anyone in the extensive public discussion of the subject.

The difficulty, as I shall try to explain, is that while we can easily evoke disturbing effects by taking up an
external view of our own actions and the actions of others, it is impossible to give a coherent account of
the internal view of action which is under threat. When we try to explain what we believe which seems to
be undermined by a conception of actions as events in the world — determined or not — we end up with
something that is either incomprehensible or clearly inadequate.

This naturally suggests that the threat is unreal, and that an account of freedom can be given which is
compatible with the objective view, and perhaps even with determinism. But I believe this is not the case.
All such accounts fail to allay the feeling that, looked at from far enough outside, agents are helpless and
not responsible. Compatibilist accounts of freedom tend to be even less plausible than libertarian ones.
Nor is it possible simply to dissolve our unanalyzed sense of autonomy and responsibility. It is something
we can't get rid of, either in relation to ourselves or in relation to others. We are apparently condemned to
want something impossible.

(The View from Nowhere, p.112)

Even as he sees efforts to explain the mind "impossible, incomprehensible, or clearly

inadequate", Nagel offers us an excellent criticism of past attempts by philosophers to limit
our investigations by claiming they are impossible. His view that problems are "intractable"
seems similar to Colin McGinn's "mysterianism."
The history of the subject is a continual discovery of problems that baffle existing concepts and existing
methods of solution. At every point it faces us with the question of how far beyond the relative safety of
our present language we can afford to go without risking complete loss of touch with reality. We are in a
sense trying to climb outside of our own minds, an effort that some would regard as insane and that I
regard as philosophically fundamental. Historicist interpretation doesn't make philosophical problems go
away, any more than the earlier diagnoses of the logical positivists or the linguistic analysts did. To the
extent that such no-nonsense theories have an effect, they merely threaten to impoverish the intellectual
landscape for a while by inhibiting the serious expression of certain questions. In the name of liberation,
these movements have offered us intellectual repression.

But that leaves a question. If the theories of historical captivity or grammatical delusion are not true, why
have some philosophers felt themselves cured of their metaphysical problems by these forms of
therapy? My counterdiagnosis is that a lot of philosophers are sick of the subject and glad to be rid of its
problems. Most of us find it hopeless some of the time, but some react to its intractability by welcoming
the suggestion that the enterprise is misconceived and the problems unreal. This makes them receptive
not only to scientism but to deflationary metaphilosophical theories like positivism and pragmatism, which
offer to raise us above the old battles.

(The View from Nowhere, p.11)

In his essay "Moral Luck," Nagel is pessimistic about finding morally responsible agents in
a world that views agents exteranlly, reducing them to happenings, to sequences of
events, following natural laws, whether deterministic or indeterministic. Free will and moral
responsibility seem to be mere illusions.
Moral judgment of a person is judgment not of what happens to him, but of him. It does not say merely
that a certain event or state of affairs is fortunate or unfortunate or even terrible. It is not an evaluation of
a state of the world, or of an individual as part of the world. We are not thinking just that it would be better
if he were different, or did not exist,. or had not done some of the things he has done. We are judging
him, rather than his existence or characteristics. The effect of concentrating on the influence of what is
not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of
mere events.

What, however, do we have in mind that a person, must be to be the object of these moral attitudes?
While the concept of agency is easily undermined, it is very difficult to give it a positive characterization.
That is familiar from the literature on Free Will.

I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution, because something in the idea of agency is
incompatible with actions being events, or people being things. But as the external determinants of what
someone has done are gradually exposed, in their effect on consequences, character, and choice itself,
it becomes gradually clear that actions are events and people things. Eventually nothing remains which
can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence
of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.

Though I cannot define the idea of the active self that is thus undermined, it is possible to say something
about its sources. There is a close connexion between our feelings about ourselves and our feelings
about others. Guilt and indignation, shame and contempt, pride and admiration are internal and external
sides of the same moral attitudes. We are unable to view ourselves simply as portions of the world, and
from inside we have a rough idea of the boundary between what is us and what is not, what we do and
what happens to us, what is our personality and what is an accidental handicap. We apply the same
essentially internal conception of the self to others. About ourselves we feel pride, shame, guilt, remorse
- and agent-regret. We do not regard our actions and our characters merely as fortunate or unfortunate
episodes - though they may also be that. We cannot simply take an external evaluative view of ourselves
- of what we most essentially are and what we do. And this remains true even when we have seen that
we are not responsible for our own existence, or our nature, or the choices we have to make, or the
circumstances that give our acts the consequences they have. Those acts remain ours and we remain
ourselves, despite the persuasiveness of the reasons that seem to argue us out of existence.

It is this internal view that we extend to others in moral judgment - when we judge them rather than their
desirability or utility. We extend to others the refusal to limit ourselves to external evaluation, and we
accord to them selves like our own. But in both cases this comes up against the brutal inclusion of
humans and everything about them in a world from which they cannot be separated and of which they
are nothing but contents. The external view forces itself on us at the same time that we resist it. One way
this occurs is through the gradual erosion of what we do by the subtraction of what happens.

The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgment that we
are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this
acknowledgment shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to
be.

Nagel presents the standard two-part argument against free will

The same thing is revealed in the appearance that determinism obliterates responsibility. Once we see
an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea
that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening. This explains why the
absence of determinism is no more hospitable to the concept of agency than is its presence — a point
that has been noticed often. Either way the act is viewed externally, as part of the course of events.
See P. F. Strawson's discussion of the conflict between the objective attitude and personal reactive attitudes in 'Freedom and Resentment', Proceedings
of the British Academy, 1962, reprinted in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action, ed. P. F. Strawson (London: Oxford University Press, 1968),
and in P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974).

The problem of moral luck cannot be understood without an account of the internal conception of agency
and its special connection with the moral attitudes as opposed to other types of value. I do not have such
an account. The degree to which the problem has a solution can be 'determined only by seeing whether
in some degree the incompatibility between this conception and the various ways in which we do not
control what we do is only apparent. I have nothing to offer on that topic either. But it is not enough to say
merely that our basic moral attitudes toward ourselves and others are determined by what is actual; for
they are also threatened by the sources of that actuality, and by the external view of action which forces
itself on us when we see how everything we do belongs to a world that we have not created.

(Moral Luck, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, p.37-38)

What It's Like To Be A Bat

While he disagrees with Nagel's argument, Dan Dennett says that Nagel's famous 1974
article "What It's Like To Be A Bat" is "the most widely cited and influential thought
experiment about consciousness."

Nagel's thesis is that purely material theories of mind, including computational theories,

cannot explain an essential component of consciousness

Nagel's goal is to refute reductionism

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current
discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist
euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain
the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction...

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these
unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain... I shall try to
explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body-why,
indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental
phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting.
With consciousness it seems hopeless...

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we
cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms...But no matter how the form may vary, the fact
that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be
that organism...fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something
that it is like to be that organism - something it is like for the organism.

We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently
devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence...Any
reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves
something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any
analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character... Without some
idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of
physicalist theory...

The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and
it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view...

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is
like to be a bat...

There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of
another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that
even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object
of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view - to understand the ascription in the first person as well
as in the third, so to speak...
This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience — facts about what it is like
for the experiencing organism - are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the
true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism...

The subjective nature of concepts has been argued for many decades. In his 1892 Sense and Reference, Gottlob
Frege said a concept would be different in every mind, since it is dependent on the peculiar experiences of each
person. See our ERR

A Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning,
or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of
rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective
nature of the things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by him because, although the
concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual
phenomenology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable from the
point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by
the same organisms or by others.
(What It's Like To Be A Bat, reprinted in Mortal Questions, Cambridge, 1979, p.165-180)

Panpsychism
For Nagel, panpsychism is the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe
have mental properties, whether or not they are parts of physical organisms.

With the theory that mind is immaterial information being used by a material biological

information processor, we can see that Nagel is correct. The basic physical constituents of
the universe all have information structures. As structures get more sophisticated, the
sophistication is new information about their organization. This information is a sort of
protopanpsychism. Matter is the substrate in which immaterial information is embodied.

For complicated reasons that grow out of quantum mechanics, information is not reducible
to (that is to say, caused bottom-up by) the matter in which it is embodied. Nagel is right
about this irreducibility:

Ordinary mental states like thought, feeling, emotion. sensation, or desire are not physical properties of
the organism - behavioral, physiological, or otherwise - and they are not implied by physical properties
alone.
("Panpsychism," in Mortal Questions, p.181)

Although Nagel is skeptical that mind is a fundamental property of everything physical,

Nagel argued that the failure of emergentism made panpsychism more probable. His
reasoning against emergence was mostly the ancient idea that nothing can come from
nothing (ex nihilo, nihil fit), but enhanced to claim that an emergent complex system must
be made from parts with similar properties.

As one of four premises in his argument for panpsychism (the others being an eliminative
materialism, nonreduction of mental states, and denial of an immaterial soul as the basis
of mind), Nagel says:

There are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All properties of a complex system that are
not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects
on each other when so combined. Emergence is an epistemological condition: it means that an observed
feature of the system cannot be derived from the properties currently attributed to its constituents. But
this is a reason to conclude that either the system has further constituents of which we are not yet aware,
or the constituents of which we are aware have further properties that we have not yet discovered.
("Panpsychism," in Mortal Questions, p.182)

Nagel is quite wrong here. Biological systems (organisms) are true emergents. They are
constructed from matter, but acquire the property of processing and
utilizing immaterial information. This can be seen as one of Nagel's "further properties that
we have not yet discovered," or at least not yet properly appreciated.

Purely material systems that preceded life are information structures, but they did not
utilize information to come into existence. They were created by purely material forces.
Biological systems utilize inherited information (e.g., DNA) to create themselves.

The "order out of chaos" of "self-organizing" complex physical systems (systems far from
thermodynamic equilibrium like Bénard cells, or the gravitational collapse of astronomical
objects - galaxies, stars, planets) are not the result of some abstract information needed to
create them.

Organisms are purposeful (teleonomic) and cognitive systems, using knowledge to

achieve their goals, to "decide" on their actions. They have a developmental history unlike
anything in the world of atoms and molecules. And they exercise downward causal
control over their constituent atoms and molecules.

The emergence of "something new under the sun" is the processing of information by
cognitive biological structures. Much more than the "order out of chaos" of complex
adaptive systems, cognitive biological systems are producing what Erwin
Schrödinger called "order out of order," by "feeding on a negative entropy stream from the
sun."

We can agree with Nagel's first premise that the entire physical world is built from material
parts (plus energy, of course). But when information structures appear in the universe
("order out of chaos" for purely physical systems, "order out of order" for biological
systems) despite the second law of thermodynamics which destroys information in the
approach to equilibrium, something physical is happening that is not material.

The pinnacle of information creation is that done by minds ("information out of order")
which are consciously aware of their use of information (mostly human minds), recognizing
it as something they have done themselves, and have done purposefully.

Mind and Cosmos

In Nagel's 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, he again attacks reduction of mind and life to
"natural" physical/material causes. And once again, his panpsychist view wants mind to be
a fundamental aspect of nature, not just an accidental "add-on." In this work, he seems to
take panpsychism all the way to a theistic origin.
I would now like to say something about the polar opposite of materialism, namely, the position that
mind, rather than physical law, provides the fundamental level of explanation of everything, including the
explanation of the basic and universal physical laws themselves. This view is familiarly expressed as
theism, in its aspect as an explanation of the existence and character of the natural world. It is the most
straightforward way of reversing the materialist order of explanation, which explains mind as a
consequence of physical law; instead, theism makes physical law a consequence of mind.

Considered as a response to the demand for an all-encompassing form of understanding, theism

interprets intelligibility ultimately in terms of intention or purpose—resisting a purely descriptive end point.
At the outer bounds of the world, encompassing everything in it, including the law-governed natural order
revealed by science, theism places some kind of mind or intention, which is responsible for both the
physical and the mental character of the universe. So long as the divine mind just has to be accepted as
a stopping point in the pursuit of understanding, it leaves the process incomplete, just as the purely
descriptive materialist account does.

("Antireductionism and the Natural Order," in Mind and Cosmos, p.21)

But in the end, Nagel finds theism no more capable than materialism to provide a complete
explanation.

However, I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My
interest is in the territory between them. I believe that these two radically opposed conceptions of
ultimate intelligibility cannot exhaust the possibilities. All explanations come to an end somewhere. Both
theism and materialism say that at the ultimate level, there is one form of understanding. But would an
alternative secular conception be possible that acknowledged mind and all that it implies, not as the
expression of divine intention but as a fundamental principle of nature along with physical law?
("Antireductionism and the Natural Order," in Mind and Cosmos, p.22)

Mind is not a fundamental principle of nature, but information is fundamental to the

creation of structures in the universe ("order out of chaos") and information processing is
fundamental to biological systems ("order out of order"). The proper place of mind in
nature is as the culmination of biological information processing. Human minds now create
new information of the most abstract kind. Information philosophy helps us investigate the
truly fundamental principles of nature.