Thomas Nagel Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

Thomas Nagel
The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected.

Thomas Nagel
If I thought that everything I did was determined by my circumstancse and my psychological condition, I woudl feel trapped.

Thomas Nagel
Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

Thomas Nagel
Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.

Thomas Nagel
Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.

Thomas Nagel
Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will—extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom.

Thomas Nagel
A person may be greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, ungenerous, unkind, vain, or conceited, but behave perfectly by a monumental act of the will.

Thomas Nagel
The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes

Thomas Nagel
We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed.... What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action.

Thomas Nagel
The inclusion of consequences in the conception of what we have done is an acknowledgement that we are parts of the world, but the paradoxical character of moral luck which emerges from this acknowledgement shows that we are unable to operate with such a view, for it leaves us with no one to be.

Thomas Nagel
Equally real at all stages of his life; specifically, the fact that a particular stage is present cannot be regarded as conferring on it any special status.

Thomas Nagel
Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Thomas Nagel
Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

Thomas Nagel
The world is a strange place, and nothing but radical speculation gives us a hope of coming up with any candidates for the truth.

Thomas Nagel
Every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.

Thomas Nagel
Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

Thomas Nagel
Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.

Thomas Nagel
I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

Thomas Nagel
If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

Thomas Nagel
Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.

Thomas Nagel
If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous t otake ourselves so seriously.

Thomas Nagel
Leading a human life is a full-time occupation, to which everyone devotes decades of intense concern.

Thomas Nagel
I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious.

Thomas Nagel
Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical—that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental....

Thomas Nagel