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💾 The Bit and the Being: Information and the Geometry of Consciousness
Throughout this series, we have investigated various ways to explain the mind, navigating the tension between physicalists and idealists. We have looked at the purely materialist “user-illusion” of Daniel Dennett, the inherent “teleological” purpose proposed by Thomas Nagel, and the perspective of process philosophy, which views consciousness as a continuous flow of creative events. We…
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Natural Teleology: Thomas Nagel’s Critique of the Materialist Worldview
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…
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The World as a Thought: George Berkeley, James Tartaglia, and the Idealist Reversal
When we began this series seven weeks ago with Alfred North Whitehead, we started with a radical rejection of “dead matter.” Whitehead famously argued that both traditional materialism and idealism suffer from the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness”—the mistake of treating abstract concepts like “matter” or “mind” as if they were the fundamental, concrete reality. To…