Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Nagel

Nagel is throwing a cold bucket of water on one of modernity's favorite self-flatteries: the idea that because we can build machines that act smart, we’re on the verge of explaining what it is to be minded. The line is engineered to sting. “Eventually, I believe” sounds patient and reasonable, but it’s a rhetorical feint; what follows is a demolition job. Calling the enterprise a “gigantic waste of time” isn’t mere skepticism, it’s a strategic insult aimed at a research culture that mistakes performance for presence.

The key move is his separation of “external tasks” from “conscious beings.” Computers, in his framing, can mimic outputs, but the analogy breaks precisely where philosophy hurts: subjective experience, the “what it is like” dimension Nagel famously argued resists third-person capture. He’s not denying that machines can be useful; he’s denying that their usefulness licenses metaphysical conclusions. The subtext is a warning about category error: treating mind as if it were essentially computation because computation is what our era knows how to engineer.

Context matters. Nagel’s career sits at the pressure point between analytic philosophy’s love of clean mechanisms and the stubborn mess of consciousness. This quote is also a critique of intellectual fashion: when a dominant technology becomes a master metaphor, it starts colonizing questions it can’t answer. In Nagel’s view, AI-as-analogy doesn’t just fail to solve the hard problem; it trains us to stop noticing the problem is there.