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 ...