The dying dreamer

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But even if Nagel did have a separate, non-philosophicalargument against the adequacy of an evolutionary account of consciousness andrationality, it would odd for Sober to put so much emphasis on it, because thephilosophical, anti-materialist argument from the inexplicability of“subjective” facts in terms of “objective” facts is (as Sober’s earlier remarksimplicitly acknowledge) a distinctively Nagelian sort of argument, and a morephilosophically interesting line of argument.  By neglecting to respond to it, Sober is failing to takeNagel on at his strongest point -- never a good thing in philosophy, andespecially not when one is purporting to show that “Nagel has not made aconvincing case.”

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/11/nagel-and-his-critics-part-iii.html
The inability of physicalism to account for subjective facts(the hard problem of consciousness) is one of the fundamental problemsconfronting a consistently secular worldview.
But the inability of physicalism to get subjective factsfrom objective facts is just half the problem facing the secularist. For healso faces the opposite problem: how to get objective facts from subjectivefacts.
The scientist can’t start with the world. He has to startwith himself. With the observer.
On the one hand, the first-person perspective isirreducible. A third-person perspective can’t capture everything that’s uniqueand essential to the first-person perspective.
On the other hand, a secularist can’t ground or justify thecorrespondence between the first-person perspective and the third-personperspective. Between his perception of the world and what the world is “really”like, apart from his perception.
Secularism is equally stymied in going from the extramentalto the mental, or the mental to the extramental. In accounting for the realityfrom the inside out or the outside in.
Without God to create both dimensions, and coordinate bothdimensions, the secularist is like a dying dreamer. Like David Lynch’s MulhollandDrive–which disappears into itself. A Möbiusband.