--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "PaliGap" <compost1uk@...> wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "salyavin808" > <fintlewoodlewix@> wrote: > > > All life on this planet is descended from one cell, a > > hybrid between two types of bacteria - which is all there > > was for billions of years - there would be no complexity or > > consciousness without that one chance event. That is as hard > > a fact as you'll find, religious types can sit around > > dreaming otherwise till the cows come home. > > Well in my (limited) biochemical understanding, bacteria are > themselves made of cells. I believe that they have a few > million nucleotides of DNA. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#Cellular_structure > > Surely the question is how did such complex biochemical > machines as these come into existence from 'random stuff'? > > Darwinian evolution, whatever its other merits, is not going > to explain the origin of life. We need a chemical, physical > theory for that. Darwinian evolution *presupposes* an accurate > inheritance mechanism. The mechanism needs to be one that is > sufficiently reliable to further the line, but sufficiently > fallible to allow the odd random mutation. The balance of > accuracy to error probably needs to be rather finely tuned. > > I think I'm with the Robin/Nagel camp (but also impressed by > Michael Behe, James Le Fanu and David Stove): It beggars > belief that from a chemical mush there could spring ready- > formed (and sufficiently robust) a biochemical inheritance > mechanism capable of carrying the weight of a Darwinist > process. > > How does goop get to beget and have kids? Or am I missing > something?
Dear PaliGap, I hope you read *Mind and Cosmos*--I believe Nagel is saying things *that no one has ever said*. [See my latest post: Part III, for an adumbration of a conception of life which is neither strictly materialistic or theistic]. If you don't have the hair stand up on your back of your head after reading the book, I will personally refund the cost of the book. ;-) Nagel goes where no one else has gone, PaliGap, and it is the connection between his own intelligence and first person ontology with reality itself [my theory] which gives such force and power and clarity to his book. No one who attempts to refute Nagel, or downplay the dramatic implications of his thesis, will be able to summon the same sense of honesty and conviction and imperturbability as he has in setting out his ideas. Until Nagel's book, every person who believed in the sufficiency of materialist neo-Darwinian evolution could project a sense of weakness, fanaticism, fear upon those who opposed the explanatory sufficiency of the theory of evolution (as it is presently understood). For all the reading I have done, Nagel has philosophically challenged the truth of the neo-Darwinian model for understanding life and human beings in a manner which possesses more danger and authority than the defenders of the naturalistic and materialist view of nature have ever possessed in their assertion of its truthfulness. I found Nagel very confronting to my own first person ontology--even as I was profoundly sympathetic to his hypothesis. And this was because of the impeccable reasoning and elegant perspicuousness of his writing. It was unequivocally a *metaphysical experience* reading his book, PaliGap--and it could not be otherwise--*because of how much truth of the universe got into that book*. Every person who reads his book will experience some intimate challenge to their own way of seeing reality--as I say, I did--and I was predisposed to concur with him about his judgment of the naturalistic-materialist view dominant in modern science and philosophy. For me, Nagel's book becomes the occasion to demonstrate the primacy of the importance of one's first person perspective(!) in determining one's experience and judgment of almost everything that is important to us. *Especially what is true*. I think Nagel's book a kind of ontological (had to get that word in there somewhere) shock to the nervous system. No one can read that book and be quite the same afterwards. Nagel--although this was not obviously his conscious intention--has intensified one's experience of what is most real--and I believe in his critique of the materialist neo-Darwinian paradigm he is absolutely right. But not only do I believe he is right, I also feel the subconscious epistemic inclination within each human being to *know* that he is right. In other words, every person who reads Nagel's book--and understands him--will, if they are to reject his thesis, have to generate a counter-violence of subjectivity (not necessarily realizing they are doing this) which will defend their first person ontology from the devastating beauty of his reasoning and in the end what is the undeniable truth of his argument. In the postmodern age reading this book comes closest to what could be described as an objective religious experience; because one is encountering something so rare: the circumstance of *what is the case* (what is the truth) somehow getting contained in the brain and heart and character of a single human being and articulating itself--even as Nagel would never consider he has written his book under the influence of any kind of muse. Of course readers of this letter I am writing to you will be justifiably outraged by my claims; but then they have not tried to see if they can endure the intensity and lucidity of Nagel's book, an experience which if you go right to the end, makes you think you have gone through an ordeal of intellectually coercive revelation. This does not mean that any readers consciously are aware of this truth--Nagel's book has already had the critical treatment in various prominent reviews (by well-known philosophers of the neo-Darwininan materialist bent)--and I doubt that any of these philosophers would ever admit they suffered some kind of existential crisis in their first person ontologies. But in reading their reviews one can sense the antecedent context of complexity and challenge which they had to go through--and then had to deny to themselves--in order to write the reviews they wrote [again, I stress: this is not necessarily conscious at all: I am sure they believe they have written honestly and objectively]. In the critical reviews that I have read I do not recognize the book that Nagel wrote. Even with the excerpts I have included in the three FFL posts, I believe every intelligent FFL reader will go through some kind of psychological and metaphysical test--You cannot read someone's response to Darwin, to materialism, to psychophysical reductionism *that you have never read before* and not be shocked by the context of reality he sets up inside of your consciousness by the purity, simplicity, and clarity of his thinking and conclusions. No book I have ever read by a living person has had the effect upon me of Nagel's *Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False*. I don't think the effect of reading this book will ever entirely leave me. And I hope it does not. Robin
