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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
Mind
Interesting
Would
Less
Science
Seems
Problem
Body
Without
Hopeless
Much
Consciousness

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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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We are an episode between two oblivions.
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every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.
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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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Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.
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I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
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What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?
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I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.
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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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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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The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.
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If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
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Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
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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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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
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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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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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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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Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
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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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