Thomas Nagel, Emeritus Professor at NYU, presents a philosophical position that challenges the completeness of the current scientific worldview. In his 2012 book Mind and Cosmos, Nagel argues that the standard materialist model of nature—the one holding that life and mind are accidental byproducts of physical laws—is logically insufficient. His work is not a defense of religious creationism, as Nagel is a self-identified atheist. Instead, it is an analytical critique of the “ideological” assumptions within modern science that fail to account for the existence of consciousness, reason, and value. Nagel posits that the very existence of these phenomena suggests that the laws of physics alone are not enough to explain the history of the universe.

The foundation of Nagel’s work began in 1974 with his paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat? This text established the distinction between objective physical facts and subjective experience. Nagel argued that while a scientist can possess a complete physical map of a bat’s sonar and neurobiology, those objective facts do not provide the subjective “first-person” experience of being a bat. This established that “perspectival” facts exist in the universe that cannot be reduced to physical brain states. In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel expands this to a cosmic scale, arguing that if science cannot account for the “inside” of reality, it cannot claim to be a comprehensive theory of the universe. He suggests that we are currently operating with a truncated view of nature that purposefully ignores the most salient feature of our existence: our own awareness.

Nagel argues that modern science has been defined by a specific tactical choice made during the Scientific Revolution. Thinkers like Galileo and Newton decided to treat the world as a collection of “primary qualities”—mathematically measurable units like size, shape, and motion. They purposefully excluded “secondary qualities” such as color, taste, and sensation, categorizing them as human subjectivity rather than objective reality. This allowed science to make incredible progress in physics and chemistry because it removed the “messiness” of human perception from the laboratory. However, Nagel claims we have reached a point where we are trying to use those “mindless” equations to explain the mind itself. He characterizes this as an ideological failure; a theory of the universe that cannot explain the existence of the observers who created the theory is, by definition, incomplete.

Nagel identifies two distinct ways in which materialism fails: the constitutive and the historical. The constitutive failure is the “Hard Problem” we have discussed in previous installments—the fact that no amount of physical arrangement seems to logically necessitate the presence of a “feeling.” The historical failure, however, is Nagel’s newer and more controversial focus. He argues that even if we could explain how a brain produces a thought, we still haven’t explained why the universe was able to produce a brain in the first place. He contends that the probability of life and mind emerging through purely random, non-directed processes is so low as to be practically impossible.

The most substantial portion of Nagel’s critique is directed at the current understanding of evolution. Neo-Darwinism suggests that the emergence of life and consciousness is the result of random genetic mutations filtered through natural selection. Nagel argues that the probability of such blind, non-directed processes producing conscious, reasoning beings is extremely low. He identifies a “structural gap” between the basic laws of physics and the complex existence of subjective experience. From a strictly materialist standpoint, a “Philosophical Zombie”—a creature that functions exactly like a human but has no inner life—would be just as successful at survival. Therefore, there is no clear evolutionary requirement for the “glow” of subjective experience to exist if the physical machinery works perfectly well without it. Evolution selects for behavior (what a creature does), not for phenomenology (how it feels while doing it).

Because the physical machinery does not require consciousness for survival, Nagel suggests that the emergence of mind indicates that the universe is not “blind.” He proposes a return to Natural Teleology, a concept derived from the Greek word telos, meaning goal or end. While modern science assumes that causes only move from the past to the future (efficient causation), teleology suggests that nature possesses inherent tendencies or “laws of development” that pull matter toward specific outcomes (final causation). Nagel’s proposition is that the universe is “sloped” toward the production of consciousness. In this framework, the universe is a system biased toward mind. It is not that mind is a random accident, but that the universe contains an inherent drive to develop into a self-aware state.

It is necessary to distinguish Nagel’s teleology from religious “Intelligent Design.” Religious frameworks typically posit a Designer who exists outside the system and intervenes in its functions. Nagel’s teleology is “immanent,” meaning the direction or drive toward consciousness is built into the fabric of the physical laws themselves. He suggests that just as an embryo has an internal direction to develop into a human, the universe has an internal direction to develop into a self-aware state. This makes mind a fundamental feature of the cosmos rather than an accidental byproduct. He argues that if mind is a product of the universe, then the potential for mind must have been present in the universe from the very beginning. This moves the discussion away from “miracles” and toward a broader definition of what is “natural.”

Nagel identifies three specific pillars of reality that he believes materialism cannot explain: consciousness, reason, and value. Regarding consciousness, he argues that if the universe is capable of producing experience, then the potential for experience must have been present in the basic constituents of matter from the beginning. You cannot logically derive “feeling” from “non-feeling” stuff unless the universe was structurally primed for it. This is a rejection of “emergentism”—the idea that if you just stack enough “dead” matter together, it eventually starts “feeling.” Nagel argues that such a jump is a logical impossibility; the “building blocks” of reality must themselves contain the seeds of mind.

Regarding reason, Nagel points out that if our brains are merely survival mechanisms, our thoughts are just chemical reactions designed for biological fitness. If that is the case, there is no reason to assume our thoughts are “true” or “accurate” regarding the nature of the universe. In a purely Darwinian world, a belief only has to be “useful” for survival, not “correct.” For example, if a creature believes that a predator is a “ghost” and runs away, it survives. The belief is useful but false. Nagel argues that the fact that human reason can discover objective mathematical and logical truths suggests that the mind is aligned with the actual structure of reality. The universe is “intelligible,” and we possess the “intelligence” that matches it. This suggests a deep, non-accidental connection between the human mind and the cosmos.

Regarding value, Nagel contends that “Good” and “Evil” are not merely subjective feelings evolved for tribal cooperation. He argues that Value is an objective part of reality. For instance, he suggests that pain is “bad” as an objective fact, not just a biological signal. If value is an objective feature of the world, then a purely materialist universe composed of value-neutral atoms could not have produced it. A world made only of “facts” (is) cannot, by itself, produce “values” (ought) unless value was already a part of the system’s foundational structure. This led Nagel to a version of Panpsychism-adjacent thought, similar to the views of Galen Strawson, though Nagel focuses more on the systemic “direction” of nature rather than the internal life of individual atoms.

Nagel’s position suggests that human beings are the “organs” of the universe. In this view, the universe is a process that has achieved self-awareness through us. When humans observe the cosmos and attempt to understand its laws, it is the universe itself becoming conscious of its own existence. This shifts the status of the human subject from a “biological accident” to a “cosmic necessity.” The mind is not a glitch in the machine; it is the point at which the machine’s internal logic becomes explicit. Nagel describes this as a “unified” view of nature—one that doesn’t split the world into “physical stuff” and “mental stuff,” but sees them as two aspects of a single, teleological process.

This philosophical shift addresses what Nagel describes as a modern crisis in the scientific world. When we operate under the assumption that we are “meat computers” in a dead world, we create a disconnect between our scientific theories and our lived experience. We are forced to treat our moral convictions as biological baggage and our reasoning as a mere survival tool. By adopting a teleological framework, these human capacities are recognized as being in sync with the structure of the universe. It provides a way to acknowledge the reality of the mind and moral value without requiring a religious or supernatural framework. Nagel argues that we should be “Naturalists” in the broadest sense, accepting all the data of our lives—including the data of consciousness—as parts of the natural world.

Nagel’s work is ultimately an exercise in philosophical realism. He argues that we must start with the facts of our existence—the facts of consciousness and reason—and build a theory of the universe that can actually hold them. If the current materialist theory cannot hold them, then the theory must be revised. This is a direct challenge to the “reductionism” that has dominated philosophy for the last century. Instead of trying to “reduce” the mind to the brain, Nagel suggests we must “expand” our definition of nature to include the mind. Nagel’s “heresy” is the claim that the mystery of our own awareness is far greater than the current scientific consensus suggests, and that a truly comprehensive science would have to include these teleological “laws of mind” to be complete. It is an invitation to reconsider the basic “stuff” of the universe and the direction in which it is moving.

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📚 Recommended Reading on Thomas Nagel and Teleology

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Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel. The central text for this post, focusing on the failure of materialism to account for mind, reason, and value.

The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. A detailed exploration of how the subjective “inner” perspective and the objective “outer” perspective conflict and how philosophy attempts to bridge them.

The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes by Donald Hoffman. A scientific perspective on how evolution does not prime us for “truth,” but for “fitness,” supporting Nagel’s skepticism of blind evolution’s ability to produce objective reason.

The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. The foundational defense of the non-teleological, materialist view of evolution, serving as the direct intellectual counterpoint to Nagel’s thesis.

Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. A collection of seminal essays, including the “Bat” paper, which first defined the “Hard Problem” of subjective experience in modern philosophy.