From Nagel's book

From the much-discussed new book by the distinguished philosopher Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos.

"The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. Biut at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. but more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science."

So the key distinction here is not so much between the mindful and the mindless elements in the cosmos, or between subjective and objective perspectives, but between two different ways of studying the world, the timeless and the historical.

If I read him rightly, Nagel is saying that mindfulness was excluded from science by Galileo among practitioners, and Descartes among philosophers, at least in significant part because science as they understood it was to be timeless, whereas mind is intrinsically historical.

Scientists from the 17th and well into the 19th century stated the laws of motion, or the speed of light, etc., in tenseless equations. They didn't typically write things like this: "For now, inertia mass is equal to gravitational mass."

In the 19th century, this notion of science as timeless began to change, Nagel suggests, with the development of evolutionary theory as integral to biology.

In the 20th century, the change came home to Galileo's home turf. Astronomy and physics are themselves now time-bound with the BigBang and the notion that the laws of physics are themselves the product of a development.

The reason, or at least one reason, for building a scientific conception of world without mind, has now disappeared. Minds still are inherently bound up with tenses -- they have memories and habits borne of the past and expectations or projects for the future. But this time-boundedness no longer sets them apart.