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Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

Thomas Nagel

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Thomas Nagel
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 4
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Body
Without
Hopeless
Much
Consciousness
Mind
Interesting
Would
Less
Science
Seems
Problem

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It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.
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I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God I don't want the universe to be like that.
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To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
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I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
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If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
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The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future--though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.
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fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.
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If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
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Once we see an aspect of what we or someone else does as something that happens, we lose our grip on the idea that it has been done and that we can judge the doer and not just the happening.
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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
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We are an episode between two oblivions.
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It seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.
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Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.
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A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
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Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
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Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.
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