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Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Thomas Nagel

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Thomas Nagel
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 4
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Belgrade
Serbia
Problem
Body
Mind
Really
Intractable
Consciousness
Makes

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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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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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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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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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Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
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Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
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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.
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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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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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Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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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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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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If you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
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We are an episode between two oblivions.
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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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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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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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There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
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I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
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