The subtitle of this book is fighting words, but gladly the pitch of Nagel’s writing is not at all antagonistic, even if it is incredibly cavalier. His main point is that the existence of three distinct phenomena---consciousness, cognition, value---must be taken as challenges to the prevailing metaphysics of the scientific consensus, what he calls the “Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature.”
This conception of nature has its premise that all there is are whatever the entities of that the best theories from physics postulate, and everything about these entities can be captured in timeless mathematical laws. At the higher levels1 this includes the phenomenon of life and consciousness: natural selection (and other selective forces) explains the historical progression of inorganic chemicals to organic ones, and from these to life, and from these to conscious beings.
This is the metaphysical doctrine that Nagel attacks, accusations of his creating a straw-man notwithstanding. Central to his argument is the notion of intelligibility: the universe somehow evolved beings who can have a grip, in the form of our scientific theories, at its immensely complicated structure. The world is intelligible because we can, in succint and elegant laws, explain how it works. Intelligibility is the ideal in the sciences, and how a theory makes the phenomena in question seem inevitable is a mark of its power. By this criterion, natural selection at its present form is a poor theory, for its explanation for consciousness, cognition and value makes the existence of these phenomena a forbiddingly remote possibility. That the laws of physics entail in the possibility of these is no explanation for their actuality. To apply the criterion of intelligibility consistently, we must look for something else.
For Nagel, this something else is his postulation of teleological laws. He thinks that, given that the laws of physics are probabilistic, these teleological laws nudge the probabilities, making the development of life and conscious beings more likely, so that the universe advances “towards the marvelous.” So he sees natural selection as not flawed but rather incomplete.
This is not a crazy book, as some reviews of it decry. One has to at some level admire Nagel’s brazeness for bucking politics and the consensus of secular intellectuals. Although at first blush it seems like Nagel is defending some form of intelligent design, he is very explicitly denies such a claim in the beginning of the book. He is a staunch atheist, and while he is defending a notion of design in the natural world he is not, by his own lights, defending intelligent design. Whether this book is one of the first in shifting the tides against neo-Darwinian materialism, as he claims, is left to be seen.
Footnotes
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Nagel does not talk much about inter-theoretic reduction, but he seems to think that the consensus in the scientific community is that such a reduction is in the offing. This is unclear, and there is a lot of work showing that such a reduction is not possible, in principle (Fodor 1974). Reduction isn’t central to his points, however. ↩