Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical - that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.
Thomas NagelPerhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to us.
Thomas NagelA theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible.
Thomas NagelMaterialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.
Thomas NagelHumans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
Thomas NagelIf a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it.
Thomas Nagel