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

This snappily titled slim volume arrived in the post today and I've started reading it immediately - interesting it's the only thing I've been reading in the last few days that has really motivated me to write. Not that my previous few days reading hasn't been fulfilling and interesting - still immersed in Virginia Woolf's biography and her diary - but I haven't had the stimulus to write until now.  The Woolf books are full of the minutia of her family members and their mental upsets and moods - her father used to have black depressions, used to walk around making involuntary groans, other family members were just barking mad and taken to asylums - it's all a little too close to home - especially that moaning out loud. I lay in bed late yesterday, waking from strange nightmares every fifteen minutes or so with a horrible sense of dread and a small involuntary cry, all that remains of the scream inside my head. The fact that this is something so many experience is of some comfort but not much.

So, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (M&C from now on), essentially picking at questions that bother me - just the sense of how improbable it was that self replicating life evolved, and the difficulty in invoking consciousness as purely an emergent property of material chemistry.  Quite aside from the horrible complexity of DNA and RNA as the companion messenger molecule, the sheer difficulty of scaffolding these complex chemicals together into a cell is not understood in any way. It is possible that early clays left pockets in which complex organic molecules could replicate - that's one theory, not in the ascendant at the moment. There are other guesses, with good if speculative thinking and science behind them, but Nagel argues that we don't live in the world of the Blind Watchmaker, that there must be another principle, another way of thinking that will allow explanation of the improbable, that pure reductionism is ultimately not enough. He's not into intelligent design though - but he does say that the intelligent designers arguments about improbability of evolution have been unfairly discarded in the rush to ridicule the concept of intelligent design.

I have a feeling that this might be useful read in the context of both Nagel and Woolf, but I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Here's the Amazon blurb for Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, Liah Greenfield

"Modern nationalism, says Greenfeld, rests on bedrock principles of popular sovereignty, equality, and secularism. Citizens of the twenty-first century enjoy unprecedented freedom to become the authors of their personal destinies. Empowering as this is, it also places them under enormous psychic strain. They must constantly appraise their identities, manage their desires, and calibrate their place within society. For vulnerable individuals, this pressure is too much. Training her analytic eye on extensive case histories in manic depression and schizophrenia, Greenfeld contends that these illnesses are dysfunctions of selfhood caused by society's overburdening demands for self-realization. In her rigorous diagnosis, madness is a culturally constituted malady."

The alternative to this "unprecedented freedom" appears to be feudalism, slavery and despotism, so not much comfort there.