I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opi… - Thomas Nagel

I believe that the general form of moral reasoning is to put yourself in other people's shoes. This leads to an impersonal concern for them corresponding to the impersonal concern for yourself that is needed to avoid a radical incongruity between your attitudes from the personal and impersonal standpoints, i.e. from inside and outside your life. Some considerable disparity remains, because your personal concern remains in relation to yourself and your life: they are not to be replaced or absorbed by the impersonal ones that correspond to them. (One is also typically concerned in a personal way for the interests of certain others to whom one is close.) But we derive moral reasons by forming in addition a parallel impersonal concern corresponding to the interests of all other individuals. It will be as strong or as weak, as comprehensive or as restricted, as the impersonal concern we are constrained by the pressures of congruency to feel about ourselves. In a sense, the requirement is that you love your neighbor as yourself; but only as much as you love yourself when you look at yourself from outside, with fair detachment.

I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death.

Usually, when we are told that X is Y we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is' alone. … But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true … and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.<p>This explains the magical flavor of popular presentations of fundamental scientific discoveries, given out as propositions to which one must subscribe without really understanding them. For example, people are now told at an early age that all matter is really energy. But despite the fact that they know what 'is' means, most of them never form a conception of what makes this claim true, because they lack the theoretical background.