What Does It All Mean –– Thomas Nagel

#book  #philosophy  #psychology  

  • Author: Thomas Nagel

  • Date Finished: [[March 16th, 2021]]

  • Type: Kindle

  • The center of philosophy lies in certain questions which the reflective human mind finds naturally puzzling, and the best way to begin the study of philosophy is to think about them directly.

  • "I'll try to leave the problems open, but even if I say what I think, you have to reason to believe it unless you find it convincing."

  • How Do We Know Anything?

    • If you try to prove the reliability of your impressions by appealing to your impressions, you're arguing in a circle and won't get anywhere.
    • [[The More We Know, The Less We Know]] #knowledge
    • All your evidence about everything has to come through your mind –– whether in the form of perception, the testimony of books, and other people, or memory –– and it's entirely consistent with everything you're aware of that nothing at all exists except the inside of your mind.
    • Perhaps the right conclusion is the more modest one that you don't know anything beyond your impressions and experiences. There may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you –– there's no way for you to tell. This view is called [[skepticism]] about the external world.
    • The only evidence that you couldn't have come into existence a few minutes ago depends on beliefs about how people and their memories are produced, which rely in turn on beliefs about what has happened in the past. But to rely on those beliefs to prove that you existed in the past would again be to argue in a circle. You would be assuming the reality of past to prove the reality of the past.
      • #comment I unknowingly performed this thought experiment on multiple occasions while growing up. I even remember asking my mum about it, about diaries and how I could be sure I wrote something from a few days ago and whether it (and my memory of it) was fabricated instead.
    • Science is just as vulnerable as perception.
      • How can we know that the world outside out minds corresponds to our idea of what would be a good theoretical explanation of our observations?
      • Impressions and appearances that do not correspond to reality must be contrasted with others that do correspond to reality, or else the contrast between appearance and reality is meaningless. [[Maya and the concept of perception]]
    • [[egocentric predicament]]: there may be no way out of the cage of your own mind.

  • Other Minds

    • What can you really know about the conscious life in this world beyond the fact that you yourself have a conscious mind? Is it possible that there might be much less conscious life than you assume (none except yours), or much more (even in things you assume to be unconscious)?

  • The Mind-Body Problem

    • Your experiences are inside your mind with a kind of insideness that is different from the way that your brain is inside your head. Someone else can open up your head and see what's inside, but they can't cut open your mind and look into it atleast not in the same way.
    • The view that the brain is the seat of unconsciousness, but that its conscious states are not just physical states, is called [[dual aspect theory]]
    • If #consciousness itself could be identified with some kind of physical state, the way would be open for a unified physical theory of mind and body, and therefore for a unified physical theory of the universe. But the reasons against a purely physical theory of consciousness are strong enough to make it seem likely that a physical theory of the whole of reality is impossible.

  • The Meaning of Words

    • With or without the concept or idea,the problem seems to be that very particular sounds, marks, and examples involved in each person's use of a word, but the word applies to something universal, which other particular speakers can also mean by that word or other words in other languages.
    • The mystery of meaning is that it doesn't seem to be located anywhere –– not in the word, not in the mind, not in a separate concept or idea hovering between the mind, and the things we are talking about.
    • We are small finite creatures, but meaning enables us with the help of sounds or marks on paper to grasp the whole world and many things in it, and even to invent things that do not exist and perhaps never will. The problem is to explain how this is possible: how does anything we say or write mean anything? #meaning

  • [[free will]]

    • Nothing up to the point at which you choose determines irrevocably what your choice will be. It remains an open possibility.
    • Some things that happen are determined in advance.
    • the sum total of a person's experiences, desires, and knowledge, his hereditary constitution, the social circumstances and the nature of the choice facing him, together with other factors that we may not know about, all combine to make a particular action in the circumstances inevitable.
    • The process of decision is just the working out of the determined result inside your mind.
      • People disagree about this: if determinism is true, no one can reasonably be praised for anything, any more that the rain can be praised or blamed for falling.

  • Right and Wrong

    • But if someone just doesn't care about other people, what reason does he have to refrain from doing any of the things usually thought to be wrong, if he can get away with it: what reason does he have not to kill, steal, lie or hurt others? [[religion]]
      • Plenty of people who don't believe in God still make judgements of right and wrong, and think no one should kill another for his wallet even if he can be sure to get away with it.
      • If God exists, and forbids what's wrong, that still isn't what makes it wrong.
      • Fear of punishment and hope of reward, and even love of God, seem not to be the right motives for morality.

  • We all think that when we suffer, it's not just bad for us, but bad, period.

    • Moral argument tries to appeal to a capacity for impartial motivation which is supposed to be present in all of us. Unfortunately it may be deeply buried, and in some cases it may not be present at all. In any case it has to complete with powerful selfish motives, and other personal motives that may not be so selfish, in its bid for control of our behaviour. The difficulty of justifying morality is not that there is only one human motive, but that there are so many.

  • Justice

    • Clearly this is a matter of luck; we are not responsible for the social or economic class or country into which we are born. The question is, how bad are inequalities which are not the fault of the people who suffer from them?
    • What's wrong, if anything, is the result: that some people start life with undeserved disadvantages.
    • The two main sources of undeserved inequalities are differences in socioeconomic classes into which people are born, and differences in natural talent or abilities for tasks which are in demand.
    • If we object to this kind of bad luck as unfair, it must be because we object to people's suffering disadvantages through no fault of their own, merely as a result of the ordinary operation of the socioeconomic system to which they are born.

  • [[death]], [[Death, Immortality and the Meaning of Life]]

    • To imagine your own annihilation you have to think of it from the outside –– think about your body of the person you are, with all the experience and life gone from it. To imagine something it is not necessary to imagine how it would feel for you to experience
    • The prospect of non-existence is frightening, atleast to many people, in a way that past non-existence cannot be.

  • The Meaning of Life

    • #meaning
    • If one's life has a point as a part of something larger, it is still possible to ask about that larger thing, what is the point of it? [[turtles all the way down]]
      • The idea that our lives fulfill God's purpose is supposed to give them their point, in a way that doesn't require or admit any further point. One isn't support to ask "What is the point of God?" any more than one is supposed to ask "What is the explanation of God?" #religion #Atheism [[Outgrowing God - Richard Dawkins]]