Nagel seeks special features of matter that make it possible for consciousness to evolve, but isn't this just expanding our understanding of matter?
The need for some sort of account of the logical features of matter, what he called "the problem of matter", had already occupied Russell much earlier.
The explanatory patterns of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics place the evolution of the macroscopic features of matter in a pattern of probabilities over possible microscopic evolutions.
First, as we have suggested implicitly, some of the interpretations of mass-energy equivalence seem to assume certain features of matter.
It says that science tells us only about the relational, structural features of matter; it is silent about the its intrinsic nature.
Kant absolutely rejects idealism, but he too believed it possible to deduce some features of matter, as physical science must theorize it, a priori.
In The Principles of Mathematics (Russell 1903, §453) there is a list of these features of matter including "indestructibility", "ingenerability" and "impenetrability", which were all characteristic of the atomic theory of the day.
While we distinguish the certain knowledge we may have of mathematical entities from the contingent knowledge of material objects, Russell says that there are certain "neat" features of matter that are just too tidy to have turned out by accident.
As Kant struggles with the problems that result from trying to account for now much more specific features of matter, it is unclear that (or how) the categories are supposed to be of help in structuring Kant's argument.
Fusion reactions between light elements, like fission reactions that split heavy elements, release energy because of a key feature of nuclear matter called the binding energy, which can be released through fusion or fission.
