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.
Thomas NagelEveryone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.
Thomas NagelIt seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense.
Thomas NagelIf sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
Thomas NagelIt is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
Thomas Nagel