Irreducibility of Consciousness in Thomas Nagel in The Context of Discussions of Consciousness

This thesis, which discusses the thoughts of Thomas Nagel who thinks that the attempts to reduce consciousness resulted in failure, consists of three parts. In the first part, the structure of the mind-body dilemma and its philosophical roots are explained; the reason why trying to explain the mental properties by reducing them to physical basis poses a philosophical problem are scrutinised. The philosophical approaches developed to solve the problem are evaluated. In the second part, after generally examining consciousness and concepts associated with it, Thomas Nagel's thoughts about consciousness are introduced with other central concepts related to consciousness. In the third part which deals with the attempts of reducing consciousness to a physical basis, general characteristics of reductionist approaches are explained and the reasons why Nagel finds these approaches unsuccessful are investigated. In the conclusion of the study, Nagel's thoughts about irreducibility of consciousness are evaluated and consequently, it is revealed that the existence of consciousness implies that the meaning frames of the concepts such as matter, physics, objectivity, scientific knowledge should be redefined.