MIND AND COSMOS: WHY THE MATERIALIST NEO-DARWINIAN CONCEPTION OF NATURE IS ALMOST CERTAINLY FALSE by Thomas Nagel
The problem does not arise with respect to the basic forms of perceptual, emotional, and appetitive consciousness that we share with any animals. Those mental functions do put us into a complex relation with the world around us, but they seem in principle susceptible of an evolutionary explanation provided it is somehow transformed from the materialist version into something capable of explaining the conscious character of these functions. . . if such experiences can somehow be added to the evolutionary menu, their roles in enabling creatures to navigate in the world, avoid dangers, find nourishment and shelter, and reproduce all make them potentially adaptive and therefore candidates for natural selection. Perception and desire have to meet certain standards of accuracy to enable creatures to survive in the world: they have to enable us to respond similarly to things that are similar and differently to things that are different, to avoid what is harmful, and to pursue what is beneficial. For most creatures, however, objectivity extends no further than this. Their lives are lived in the world of appearances, and the idea of a more objective reality has no meaning. But once we come to recognize the distinction between appearances and reality, and the existence of objective factual or practical truth that goes beyond what perception, appetite, and emotion tell us, the ability of creatures like us to arrive at such truth, or even to think about it, requires explanation. An important aspect of this explanation will be that we have acquired language and the possibility of interpersonal communication, justification, and criticism that language makes possible. But the explanation of our ability to acquire and use language in these ways presents problems of the same order, for language is one of the most important normatively governed faculties. To acquire a language is in part to acquire a system of concepts that enables us to understand reality. . . [What is] the likelihood that the process of natural selection should have generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances--as we take ourselves to have done and to continue to do collectively in science, logic, and ethics. Is it credible that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time? The second problem is the difficulty of understanding naturalistically the faculty of reason that is the essence of these activities. . . What we want to know how likely it is, for example, that evolution should have given some human beings the capacity to discover, and other human beings the capacity to understand, the laws of physics and chemistry. If there is no real, judgment-independent physical world, no judgment-independent truths of mathematics, and no judgment-independent truths of ethics and practical reason, then there is no problem explaining how we are able to learn about them. On an antirealist view, scientific or moral truths depend on our systematic cognitive or conative responses rather than being something independent to which our response may or may not conform. The "worlds" in question are all just human constructions. In that case an explanation of how those responses--including our scientific theories--were formed will not have to explain their objective correctness in order to be acceptable (although it will have to explain their internal coherence). Antirealism of this kind is a more serious option for the moral than for the scientific case. One can intelligibly hold that moral realism is implausible because evolutionary theory is the best current explanation of our faculties, and an evolutionary account cannot be given of how we would be able to discover judgment-independent moral truth, if there were such a thing. But it would be awkward to abandon scientific realism for analogous reasons, because one would then have to become an antirealist about evolutionary theory as well. That would mean that evolutionary theory is inconsistent with scientific realism and cannot be understood realistically, which seems an excessively strong result. There would be something strange to the point of incoherence about taking scientific naturalism as the ground for antirealism about natural science. . . . . The goal (of a naturalized epistemology) would be to explain how innate mental capacities that were selected for their immediate adaptive value are also capable of generating, through extended cultural evolutionary history, true theories about a law-governed natural order that there was no adaptive need to understand earlier. The evolutionary explanation would have to be indirect, since scientific knowledge had no role in the selection of the capacities that generated it.
