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Modern science assumes the causal closure of physics or what is referred to as the completeness of physics. If the forces physics describes are the only forces in the world, then everything can be explained in terms of those forces without remainder. And so, when Neo-Darwinian informed science explains the evolution of humankind and our behavior, it assumes the causal closure of physics. This is referred to as naturalism or the naturalistic stance. The author, a philosophy professor at New York University since 1980 does not believe in the causal closure of physics. Why doesn't he believe in the causal closure of physics? It's because he doesn't believe the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution can explain the origin of consciousness, meaning, value and morality. What are his reasons? 1) The probability of it happening by chance is too low. 2) There hasn't been enough time for consciousness to evolve. What evidence does he provide? It's just a gut instinct based on his common sense intuitions. However, his common sense intuitions haven't been honed by a scientific education. In a shocking admission in the beginning of the book, Mr. Nagel admits that his scientific education is limited to reading popular science books. When reading the book, it is clear that he is not even widely read in popular science. It is also clear that many of his ideas come from reading popular pseudo-scientific books written by creationist and intelligent design advocates. Since he believes physics is not casually closed or complete, Mr. Nagel has to invent another force acting in the world to complete it. This force is mind. It is a position known as panpsychism:. All matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view. How this mysterious something extra is supposed to explain consciousness or its evolution is never explained. It reminds me of Moliere. Why does opium make us sleepy? It makes us sleepy due to its dormative properties. This smacks of ad hocism. His whole argument is the argument from incredulity: P is too incredible (or: I cannot imagine how P could possibly be true); therefore, P must be false. Since he can't understand how science can explain consciousness, it is therefore unexplainable in terms of existing science. His limitations are the scientific community's limitations. One of his unstated assumptions is that a justificationist perspective informs science, which if true, makes it vulnerable to Münchhausen's trilemma. All attempts at justifying a position end in one of three states: 1) Circular reasoning, 2) Infinite regress, 3) Axiomatic startintg point, or fideism( foundationalism ) Mr. Nagel accuses naturalistic Neo-Darwinian science of falling prey to all three. Naturalist epistemology can't justify itself without begging the question, reason couldn't have evolved because it would involve an infinite regress, and thirdly, naturalism is an ideology. Accusing science of being an ideology is a rhetorical ploy used by creationists and ID proponents. Since they cannot refute evolutionary science, they claim it is an ideology. Once asserted to be an ideology, they employ the tu quoque argument and claim that everyone has to adopt foundational assumptions that cannot be proven. Hence the creationist, ID, or panpsychic assumptions are just as valid a way of bootstrapping a theory as naturalism. However, since Popper, a falsificationist perspective informs science. Although this is at the cost of certainty, the benefit is explaining why science is a never-ending open-ended endeavor. Given science's progress thus far, it is excessively premature to give up and seek other explanations for the evolution of consciousness, meaning, value and morality. Mr. Nagel does not hold his beliefs subject to the implications of science, but instead, holds beliefs and then states that science is therefore wrong. For example, Nagel states, "Street holds that a Darwinian account is strongly supported by contemporary science, so she concludes that moral realism is false. I follow the same inference in the opposite direction: since moral realism is true, a Darwinian account of the motives underlying moral judgment must be false, in spite of the scientific consensus in its favor." Mr. Nagel never says why moral realism is true, he just states that it is. His beliefs are based on his innate sense of how things just have to be. He's an atheist for the same reason. He says he just doesn't have a sense that god exists, therefore he doesn't. Elsewhere he says. "However, in my case the scientific credentials of Darwinism, and these other examples, are not enough to dislodge the immediate conviction that objectivity is not an illusion with respect to basic judgments of value." Mr. Kant believed that the world was Euclidean and that this was a necessary truth of reason. It later turned out he was wrong. He is also believed Newtonian mechanics accurately described the world. We later found is doesn't. Mr. Nagel believes that the law of the excluded middle is a truth of logic that is somehow embedded in reality. However, if the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, this is not the case. Basing our beliefs on our intuitions is a poor way to proceed. All modern science is based on its rejection. Because of his self-professed scientific illiteracy, he is completely unaware of the advances in neuroscience, or how game theory can explain the logic of behavior or how biosemiotics is beginning to explain how meaning and value can arise in a completely mindless material universe.. The problem with Nagel's book is that it is ultimately anthropocentric. All prior life forms were precursors to the ultimate expression of the universe: humans. He has no concept that we might be mere way stations along the road to some future that doesn't include humans or consciousness. Consciousness may very well be an evolutionary dead-end. Whatever the future brings, it will certainly include a post-human humanity with entirely different needs, morals, and values. Like all pre-Darwinian thinkers, he lives in a world of stasis. He believes in a platonic world that contains eternal truths. However, he provides no method for ascertaining what those truths are or when we've discerned them. According to Mr. Nagel, some mysterious teleological process has guided evolution that resulted in consciousness and value. He cannot accept that we are negentropic energy sinks that have effloresced out of a mindless material universe and will one day disappear without leaving a trace. Claiming that the material world contains mind and is guided by a teleological process adds nothing to the scientific description of the world. There's no way to test for it. The beauty of this, however, is that fideists can add all the non-testable, non-refutable beliefs they need to a theory to get back to their religion. But this is not science. Nagel drifts back and forth between claiming that he is just engaged in a thought experiment, and claiming that evolutionary theory is false in the sense of incomplete. If he would have explicitly stated that what he is doing is a thought experiment and consistently stuck to that line of argument, without claiming the evolutionary theory is false, the book would have been stronger. The subtitle of the book is: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Mr. Nagel comes no where close to doing this. Instead the book is a embarrassing collection of non sequiturs.