Teleology and Thomas Nagel (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 15:15 (3138 days ago)

As I see teleology everywhere, this is an excellent review of Nagel's book, Mind and cosmos, but also an attempted takedown of teleology as a driving philosophic argument:-https://aeon.co/essays/what-s-it-all-for-is-a-question-that-belongs-in-the-past?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=1c815e907f-Daily_Newsletter_20_April_20164_19_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-1c815e907f-68942561-"It was an idea long consigned to the dustbin of scientific history. ‘Like a virgin consecrated to God,' Francis Bacon declared nearly 400 years ago, it ‘produces nothing'. It was anti-rational nonsense, the last resort of unfashionable idealists and religious agitators. And then, late last year, one of the world's most renowned philosophers published a book arguing that we should take it seriously after all. Biologists and philosophers lined up to give the malefactor a kicking. His ideas were ‘outdated', complained some. Another wrote: ‘I regret the appearance of this book.' Steven Pinker sneered at ‘the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker'. The Guardian called it ‘the most despised science book of 2012'. So what made everyone so angry?-"The thinker was Thomas Nagel, the book was Mind and Cosmos, and the idea was teleology. In ancient science (or, as it used to be called, natural philosophy), teleology held that things — in particular, living things — had a natural end, or telos, at which they aimed. The acorn, Aristotle said, sprouted and grew into a seedling because its purpose was to become a mighty oak. Sometimes, teleology seemed to imply an intention to pursue such an end, if not in the organism then in the mind of a creator. It could also be taken to imply an uncomfortable idea of reverse causation, with the telos — or ‘final cause' — acting backwards in time to affect earlier events. For such reasons, teleology was ceremonially disowned at the birth of modern experimental science.-***-"In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel's suggested teleology does not involve a creator; it is merely a law-like tendency in the universe that somehow loads the dice in favour of the appearance of consciousness. In this conception, Nagel writes, ‘things happen because they are on a path that leads to certain outcomes'. (It is important that other laws of nature be non-deterministic, as quantum physics arguably implies they are, in order for the teleological law to have some purchase over events.) As Nagel puts it, it might be that the universe exhibits ‘a bias toward the marvellous'. If so, it would not be surprising that consciousness had appeared, because we live in a universe whose very purpose, aim, or telos, is the production of consciousness.-***-"In cosmology, in fact, teleological principles are seriously proposed in some quarters as an answer to the ‘fine-tuning' puzzle — why the laws of nature are ‘just right', to a very fine degree of precision, for allowing a universe that can support life. The physicist Paul Davies endorses a teleological ‘life principle' in his book The Goldilocks Enigma (2007). This is an example of what is called ‘anthropic' reasoning, which generally proceeds by inverting the question of human origins. Instead of asking how we came to be here in the universe as we understand it, an anthropic line of inquiry begins by observing that we are here, and then explores what that fact might tell us about the universe.-***-"Nagel's view seems even more vulnerable, on its own terms, over the bleaker long scale of time. Why should we assume that rational creatures like us (wherever they might be: Nagel notes the possibility of alien intelligences) are the telos of the universe, when there is plenty of universal history left to go yet? Some scientists forecast that the universe will eventually end in ‘heat death', a state of maximum entropy when there is no energy left for anything to happen. Perhaps that, instead, is the ultimate telos of the universe. If so, it might seem a gratuitous and even cosmically cruel diversion to have caused minds to have evolved along the way at all."-Comment: Wonderful essay. Read it all. Not my view, as I remain bound to teleology.