Summary of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The mind-body problem is not just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind, brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history. #2 The argument from the failure of psychophysical reductionism is a philosophical one. It argues that because the physical sciences cannot provide a comprehensive theory of everything, any other more or less unified understanding must take in the entire cosmos as we know it. #3 The reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution of life is highly implausible. It is difficult to believe that life as we know it was created through a sequence of physical accidents and natural selection. However, many people have no doubt that accidental genetic variation is enough to support the actual history of evolution by natural selection. #4 The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. But more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science. Mind, as a development of life, must be included as the most recent stage of this long cosmological history.