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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

Book by Thomas Nagel · 9 quotes · Universe, Accounts, Capable

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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
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“Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.”

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Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
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“Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”

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Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
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“It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.”

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Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
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“What we take ourselves to be doing when we think about what is the case or how we should act is something that cannot be reconciled with a reductive naturalism, for reasons distinct from those that entail the irreducibility of consciousness. It is not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and to discover what is objectively the case that presents a problem....Thought and reasoning are correct or incorrect in virtue of something independent of the thinker's beliefs, and even independent of the community of thinkers to which he belongs. (p. 71)”

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Book:Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
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