Science and Identity; I am in Want of a Functionalist's Mechanism

This will be a slight detour into the value of Scientists in our contemporary search for a unified vision. It may be arguable to some that the most meaningful task of the contemporary Philosopher is to find some avenue into reconciling our human identity with the material world. Dr. Baird has quoted the following to death all semester, but the intense relevance and action-shaping power of the quote to follow never looses its grasp on my beginning into every thought and every action.

“The most important question in contemporary philosophy is this: How, and to what extend, can we reconcile a certain conception that we have of ourselves as conscious, mindful, free, social and political agents with a world that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless particles in fields of force? How, and to what extent, can we get a coherent account of the totality of the world that will reconcile what we believe about ourselves with what we know for a fact from physics, chemistry and biology?” (Searle, Freedom & Neurobiology, 26)

I will not be able to say anything more poignant than that, and I will not attempt my own reconciliation though I have thoughts on how we may try this. I will keep my thoughts general and get into the particulars later if time allows...and maybe even if it doesn't.

We can only stand on the shoulders of giants . . . Giants who loved their work knowing that for as long as there are questions their work remains open. The history of science is littered with love-tortured souls whose furious dedication to the minute was fueled by the idea that this life may not live to see the synthesis of the most pertinent questions. So from one Giant's truth, to the page, to your eyes, from your lips? If words truly build understandings within you, it would be your experience to which those words attach-- it would be the truest thing you have lived that came pouring from you. You wouldn't be able to help this. We are always telling others what we don't know when we are saying the things we think we know. When we have lived, it is our lives that illuminate, ask questions of and wrestle with a reading, a new person, new philosophical perspective. But only when added to education can our minds build crucial understandings out of phenomena whose only promise is to remain suspended in the abstract.

There will always be new information. And there are no such things as "hypocrites" except for those who use the word to indicate that they wish to stay as they are. In our common tongue, we use the word hypocrite as nothing more than a condemnation of one who subscribes to a particular system, which we have inherited and have been conditioned to find palatable, in the hopes that we may shame them from any and all deviance that, as copies, might make us feel inadequate by relation. Both stability and ignorance are sustained by this informal constraint so popularly employed.