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If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

Thomas Nagel

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Thomas Nagel
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 4
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Everything
Feel
Feels
Trapped
Psychological
Condition
Determined
Conditions
Thought

More quotes by Thomas Nagel

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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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I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.
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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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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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Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
Thomas Nagel
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What is it like to be a bat? What is it like for a bat to be a bat?
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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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.
Thomas Nagel
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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