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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
Really
Intractable
Consciousness
Makes
Problem
Body
Mind

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Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.
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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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Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
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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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Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.
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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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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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If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.
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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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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 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 you want the truth rather than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
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Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many.
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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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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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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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