In sickness and in health

I have been a tad under the weather for the past 10 days or so, hence (yet another) extended silence. I caught a cold from Sanae which means that it was a highly evolved viral pathogen as it managed to successfully jump the species gap between hobbits and the race of men.
Lying in bed amidst my paracetemol fulled delirium, I was, as you would be, assailed by thoughts of Cartesian dualism and how little control we have over our bodies. I didn't want to be sick, sweaty and feeling like my head was swaddled in thick, barbed wool, but my mental feeling had no effect on my physical body. 
Some 350 years ago Descartes proposed that this mind-body divide occurred because each was made from distinct substances; minds are unbounded thinking, feeling substances, whereas bodies are substances that occupy and operate within spatial boundaries. This though raised the problem of causation - if they are so distinct how to do they interact and influence each other?
Three and half centuries of debate, declarations and denouncements later and the short answer is: we don't know. Which in of itself is quite interesting. If you think about what mankind has achieved in the intervening years in so many other areas of human endeavour, from genetics to digitalization, it is all the more remarkable that our understanding of subjective consciousness and its relationship to the physical world is fundamentally no different from what Descartes proposed back in the 17th century.
This in turn poses a disquieting conundrum for modern science, particularly its materialist tendency to reduce everything to detectable, finite matter such at atoms, protons, neurons, etc. Whereas at one level we can confidently state that the brain is composed of neurons and mental activity is determined by how there neurons interact with each other, at the much more subjective level of how we consciously experience the world around us, we have no idea of how neurological activity gives rise to such consciousness.
Now this may all seem a little bit esoteric to everyone beyond my sick bed, but it has some interesting ramifications. The philosopher Thomas Nagel contends that the mind-body problem is not just a problem of the mind, but is essential to "our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history". For Nagel there is fundamental flaw in what he terms 'materialism' (i.e. that everything, as in 'the life, the universe and everything', can be explained in terms of fundamental matter, yes, those atoms, protons, higgs boson particles, etc., that we all know so well).
However, Nagel's line of argument is that if materialism can't account for consciousness then it can't fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life (though with some of my students that doesn't seem to be an issue). And if materialism can't explain life, then it can't fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. For Nagel, the only way to solve this mind-body-cosmos problem is to radically reconceive what we understand science to be.
Deep breaths, people.
Some time during the third day of my illness, my feverish brain grappling with the import of all this, I thought I had the answer. 
It was 42.