The View From Nowhere Quotes

“The widespread willingness to rely on thermonuclear bombs as the ultimate weapon displays a cavalier attitude toward death that has always puzzled me. My impression is that...most of the defenders of these weapons are not suitably horrified at the possibility of a war in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed...I suspect that an important factor may be belief in an afterlife, and that the proporttion of those who think that death is not the end is much higher among the partisans of the bomb than among its opponents.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“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 View From Nowhere

“Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality, and it must occupy as fundamental a place in any credible world view as matter, energy, space, time and numbers.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“Even if we acknowledge the existence of distinct and irreducible perspectives, the wish for a unified conception of the world doesn’t go away. If we can’t achieve it in a form that eliminates individual perspectives, we may inquire to what extent it can be achieved if we admit them.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“too many hypotheses and systems of thought in philosophy and elsewhere are based on the bizarre view that we, at this point in history, are in possession of the basic forms of understanding needed to comprehend absolutely anything.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“...the advanced intellectual capacities of human beings...are extremely poor candidates for evolutionary explanation....But the capacity to form cosmological and subatomic theories takes us so far from the circumstances in which our ability to think would have had to pass its evolutionary tests that there would be no reason whatever, stemming from the theory of evolution, to rely on it in extension to those subjects. In fact if, per impossible, we came to believe that our capacity for objective theory were the product of natural selection, that would warrant serious skepticism about its results beyond a very limited and familiar range. An evolutionary explanation of our theorizing faculty would provide absolutely no confirmation of its capacity to get at the truth. Something else must be going on if the process is really taking us toward a truer and more detached understanding of the world.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“It might seem there could be no form of thought about your own death except either an external view, in which the world is pictured as continuing after your life stops, or an internal view that sees only this side of death—that includes only the finitude of your expected future consciousness. But this is not true. There is also something that can be called the expectation of nothingness, and though the mind tends to veer away from it, it is an unmistakable experience, always startling, often frightening, and very different from the familiar recognition that your life will go on for only a limited time—that you probably have less than thirty years and certainly less than a hundred.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“It might seem there could be no form of thought about your own death except either an external view, in the world is pictured as continuing after your life stops, or an internal view that sees only this side of death—that includes only the finitude of your expected future consciousness. But this is not true. There is also something that can be called the expectation of nothingness, and though the mind tends to veer away from it, it is an unmistakable experience, always startling, often frightening, and very different from the familiar recognition that your life will go on for only a limited time—that you probably have less than thirty years and certainly less than a hundred.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“The way the world is includes appearances, and there is no single point of view from which they can all be fully grasped!. An”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“Persons and other conscious beings are part of the natural order, and their mental states are part of the way the world is in itself.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere

“All these theories are motivated by an epistemological criterion of reality—that only what can be understood in a certain way exists.”
― Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere