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 Newsletter Nr. 660   
 Amsterdam, May 31th, 2017


WHAT'S IT LIKE TO BE A SUPER-NOVA? - Ken Wilber's Cosmic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem - FRANK VISSER

In 1974 philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper on consciousness, that would become very famous: "What's It Like to Be a Bat?"[1] Daniel Dennett, a critic of Nagel's argument, nevertheless called this paper "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness."[2] Nagel suggested that no materialist theory of mind could ever explain the subjectivity of conscious experience, "what is it like to be" something. Since its publication Nagel's thesis has been widely debated and engaged with in the world of the "philosophy of mind", a philosophical discipline which concerns itself with the nature of consciousness. In 2012 Nagel published Mind and Cosmos, which had the ominous subtitle (most probably thought up by an editor), "Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False".[3] Since neo-Darwinism is, according to Nagel, incapable of explaining human consciousness, the scientific view of the world is incomplete and has to be complemented by some other, unspecified, forces ("principles of an entirely different kind"). Furthermore, he argued that creationists opposing the neo-Darwinian worldview shouldn't be treated with the scorn they usually receive from conventional science. According to Nagel, there is a "bias towards the marvelous" in the cosmos at large. Doesn't that sound familiar?

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