• Consciousness,  Darwinism,  Materialism,  Thomas Nagel

    A Worldview on the Brink

    Thomas Nagel argues that if you are committed to a reductive materialism/physicalism and a darwinistic historical narrative you have a problem – consciousness. A darwinist is one who holds to the evolutionary story. It is a description of history that attempts to explain how we have emerged to be rational, moral, conscious human beings through natural selection and laws of nature. A materialist holds to a set of presuppositions that imply that reality is fundamentally reducible to what is physical. Nagel says that darwinistic materialists are committed to a set of presuppositions (a constitutive account) that is reductionary (all is physical) and a story (a historical account) that is emergent (all that…