Thomas Nagel or The Mystery of Consciousness
About the event
ENJOY PHILOSOPHY MEETS WEEKLY EVERY SUNDAY BETWEEN 11.30 AND 14.30 AT EDUARDO VII PARK, HERE:** [https://goo.gl/maps/5e3jKFEweXkNvDdK6](https://goo.gl/maps/5e3jKFEweXkNvDdK6)
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We will learn, debate, enjoy and investigate philosophers and diverse themes from the philosophical perspective. Each reunion is structured as a conversation among all attendees about that day s philosopher softly moderated by the organizer. The conversation will kick-off from the very brief suggested reading providing easy access to all attendees both to the philosopher and the conversation.
Let´s be greek and dive today on…
Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher (1937) specially influential for his challenge of Physicalism — a view that claims that reality is fundamentally physical and that everything that exists, including the human mind and consciousness, must ultimately be explainable in terms of the physical processes of the brain.
Thomas Nagel questions such an explanation as incomplete, given that consciousness has an essentially subjective character: there is something it feels like, from the inside, to see red, feel pain, taste coffee, or simply be oneself.
Nagel therefore advances in Philosophy of the Mind, the intense exploration that Phenomenology initiated around the same concerns during all the 20th Century, focused on philosophically accounting for those subjective experiences, so difficult to grasp under the required objectivity of traditional sciences.
Our conversation will dive into Nagel´s thinking on consciousness, drawing from his major works (*Mortal Questions* — particularly the famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) — *The View from Nowhere* (1986), and *Mind and Cosmos* (2012).
We will explore with Nagel some of his fundamental ideas, essentially:
1) The subjective character of conscious experience What does it mean to say that, for every conscious being, “how it is like” to be that being? What distinguishes having an experience from merely processing information or responding to stimuli?
2) The tension between the subjective and objective perspectives. Science attempts to understand reality from an increasingly objective, third-person perspective. Consciousness, however, seems essentially connected to a first-person point of view. Can an objective description ever fully capture subjective experience? Could we know everything about a bat’s brain and behavior and still not know what it is like to be a bat?
3) If subjective experience cannot be fully captured by an objective physical description, what does this tell us about Physicalism?
Is consciousness simply something science has not yet fully explained, or does its existence reveal a fundamental limitation in our current conception of nature?
And if so... do we need to rethink our understanding of reality itself?
Lets think with Thomas on how can a subjective experience appear in a physical world...
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