Natural Teleology: More Thomas Nagel (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Sunday, February 03, 2013, 12:05 (4099 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You say twice that Nagel "offers no answers". ...... I think it's to Nagel's credit that he recognizes the gaps in the materialist argument and is searching for a different route that will fill those gaps without creating others (as is the case with any form of God), and without resorting to faith. Even if he does "smell" like dhw and offers no answers, don't hold it against him!-DAVID: No, I do him credit for trying, and for stopping when he can go no further. but he has certainly put a nail in the darwin theory coffin. The subtitle of his book is: "Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False." That statement is very positive, and brings to mind Paul Davies who says we have to add information, but he also has no idea where that info comes from. 
IT MUST COME FROM SOMEWHERE. Tell me it arises de novo. It still boils down to the consideration that the information has a first cause. Only an intellect can create information.-We have long since agreed that parts of Darwin's theory are in trouble, e.g. random mutations and gradualism, but you have never claimed that evolution did not take place. One controversy is over HOW it took place, and another is over how its mechanisms came into being. But the basis of the theory ... namely, that all forms of life descended from earlier forms ... remains unchallenged except by Creationists, and you have said many times that you are not a Creationist.-I don't agree that only an intellect can create information. Information is everywhere, even in a grain of sand, though it takes an intellect of some kind to extract, evaluate and use it. You're right, of course that everything must come from somewhere ... including the grain of sand ... and since all effects have causes, theoretically we can go back indefinitely. That includes going back prior to the Big Bang, if it happened. You and I have agreed, though, that there has to be a first cause, and we have even agreed that it's energy. The difference between us is that I stop there. You insist that first cause energy is a universal intellect with self-awareness and even with a purpose in its mind. I say maybe. Or maybe it's impersonal and unselfconscious, but during its eternal and infinite movements and transformations into matter, it has formed combinations which themselves have a degree of awareness that has gradually evolved, epitomized by the way lesser "intellects" have evolved into greater here on Earth. Maybe. -Your version is a single planning mind right from the start; what I've described is not a single mind, and doesn't even lead to a single mind: it's an on-going process with an almost infinite number of different "minds" (in inverted commas, because they're not minds as we know them ... just as your God is not a mind as we know it) constantly combining to form new "minds". You might call it process theology without God. It still requires faith ... that energy and matter can develop their own laws and degrees of awareness ... but no more faith than is required to believe in a single eternal and universal intellect that has always had its own laws and awareness, or in countless giant strokes of luck. I say "maybe" to all of them, but Nagel's "natural teleology" is clearly more in line with the above form of panpsychism.