Such a snappy title - or did I make that lame joke the last time I referred to it? It has this wonderful ring to it though, the "almost certainly" throwing what we might unfairly call the "Logic of Dawkins" back in his face. Because, make no doubt about it, this book does tug at all the uneasy feelings you have about "how?" How did it all come about? - yeah, yeah evolution is the best we've got , it does make sense but not all the way. The Theists have their day and then God Squadders wade in with their triumphant right wing nastiness all in the name of the Lord.
Well that was a very uncool rant to begin what was to be my gentle exploration of the the fact that there seems to be good evidence that we are missing out on crucial thinking regarding the development of life and the development of consciousness. I'm reading the book very slowly, underlining things in pencil, making notes like this: " 'the prevailing doctrine' that life has appeared solely by random physical laws cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption". I think I'm getting it, in that I'm understanding that he's not posing any particular solutions, not sticking out for, say, Neutral Monism ( dontcha just love it, tossing these terms around - means you can get it on with the Bhuddists when they talk about the numinous), just saying that reductive materialism is, at bottom, so highly improbable that there must be something else.
I'd always veered towards a kind of sloppy emergence, the idea that as systems get really complex so new emergent things, well, emerge, including consciousness but Nagel does argue very forcefully that that is just not good enough. It's enough to turn you into a dualist and start searching for the ghost in the machine all over again. Because, actually, if there was something out there to be discovered as fundamental as relativity or quantum theory, why not posit it as being all ghost wrapped up entirely with our ordinary world, but undetectable and unprovable.
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