...THOMAS NAGEL: THOUGHTS ARE REAL
Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in his view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical:
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