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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
Without
Hopeless
Much
Consciousness
Mind
Interesting
Would
Less
Science
Seems
Problem
Body
More quotes by Thomas Nagel
What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?
Thomas Nagel
Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.
Thomas Nagel
I should not really object to dying were it not followed by death.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.
Thomas Nagel
The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
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.
Thomas Nagel
