Theory of Mind: Daniel Dennett vs. Thomas Nagel

Theory of Mind: Thomas Nagel and Daniel Dennett The mind-body problem consists of two very different theories; Dualism and materialism. These are two theories that are on opposite sides of the spectrum and I will compare not only their ideas, but also the ways in which they coincide and oppose each other. From these two theories, I agree with materialism since I believe our consciousness and “life” consists of nothing more than the physical mind. Dualism is the assumption that mental phenomena are both non-physical and physical, consisting of a physical body and a non-physical mind. A famous dualist was Thomas Nagel, whom attributed the consciousness of the mind to physical and non-physical properties. Thomas Nagel believed that dualism was the correct theory of life due to the fact that the consciousness of mind is too complex to have arisen through solely physical means. In his publication titled What is it like to be a bat? Nagel builds on his dualistic view of life and emphasizes how any purely physical explanation for the consciousness of mind, if existent, is in the distant intellectual future. Nagel believes that we have absolutely no conception of how a physical explanation for the mind-problem would be, and therefore strengthens his dualistic viewpoint of the mind. As stated in What is it like to be bat?, however, there are some restrictions as to whether an organism can be considered conscious, as described in the following statement “But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism -- something it is like for the organism.” (Nagel 2). Nagel calls this the subjective character of experience and goes on to say that this idea is basically the opposite of the materialistic view since it is not captured by any reductive analyses. Nagel affirms that the subjective character exists and uses this as a form of discrediting materialism since the subjective character is not