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Thomas Nagel is well-known for asking the question, "What is it like to be a bat?" I think it is a useful exercise to try to answer this question before reading his Mind and Cosmos. At dusk I see bats navigating expertly around trees and making precise changes of course to pluck an insect from the air. Bats evidently have as accurate a representation of three dimensional space as we do but with one crucial difference: it is constructed by a brain that relies on sound rather than light. Try to imagine that. Having a very detailed understanding of how neurons fire in the bat brain will get us no closer to understanding what it is like to be a bat. The same can be said of understanding human consciousness. A scanner that could show us the intricate patterns of neurons firing in real time would be a scientific (and aesthetic) marvel, but viewing the output would bring us no closer to understanding the experience of awareness, the meaning of the thoughts, of what it is like to be that person whose brain is being scanned. Material explanations cannot lead to the understanding of non-material consciousness. Nagel builds on this insight more thoroughly than any other thinker I am aware of. His claim in this book is that science, being objective and materialist, can make only a limited claim to a Theory of Everything (TOE) because it cannot explain essentially subjective phenomena. Awareness, in all its forms in life on Earth, is a cosmological fact as much as is matter, organized as it is into particles, stars and brains. Science is very successful at prying out the material consequences of the big bang, where each new level of complexity is built on the inherent properties of lower levels. Nagel has no criticism whatsoever of how the scientific enterprise is conducted; he simply questions its claims to completeness. He is aware that his anti-reductionist project is essentially negative. He has no proposal for explaining how the universe evolved a subjective component, or, as he says, how the universe came to be aware of itself. But he does have ideas of how to shape the discussion. First, he is an atheist and does not accept theistic explanations. He also believes that consciousness arises from matter, but he insists that we face up to the logical consequences of this view: the material universe must have properties that lead to the creation of consciousness. This is a no bigger claim than saying quarks have properties that lead to protons, which lead to atoms, molecules and so forth. And what are these as yet unrecognized properties of the universe? Nagel appears to find a teleological approach the most plausible. He finds, for instance, that the conscious universe has values, starting as simple animal behavioral responses to pleasure and pain and evolving into the complex value systems of human culture. So value must be an inherent property. He does not limit values to a striving toward goodness; he knows that a teleological universe must take responsibility for suffering as well. Hopefully this very brief summary will encourage you to read the book. Nagel writes very clearly and the book is meant for a general audience. And if you, like me, have long been unsatisfied with explanations of consciousness by neuroscientists and materialist philosophers of mind, you will find this a satisfying read.