There Are No Forces On

...but I Also Can't Prove That Mushrooms Could Not Be Intergalactic Spaceships Spying On Us.

If The Concept Of Consciousness Were To Fall To Science, What Would Happen To Our Sense Of Moral Agency And Free Will? If Conscious Experience Were Reduced Somehow To Mere Matter In Motion, What Would Happen To Our Appreciation Of Love And Pain And Dreams And Joy? If Conscious Human Beings Were Just Animated Material Objects, How Could Anything We Do To Them Be Right Or Wrong?

If I Were To Give A Prize For The Single Best Idea Anybody Ever Had, I'd Give It To Darwin For The Idea Of Natural Selection - Ahead Of Newton, Ahead Of Einstein - Because His Idea Unites The Two Most Disparate Features Of Our Universe: The World Of Purposeless, Meaningless Matter And Motion, Particles Jostling On The One Side, And The World Of Meaning And Purpose, Design On The Other.

The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery Once Put It. A Mind Is Fundamentally An Anticipator, An Expectation-generator. It Mines The Present For Clues, Which It Refines With The Help Of The Materials It Has Saved From The Past, Turning Them Into Anticipations Of The Future. And Then It Acts, Rationally, On The Basis Of Those Hard-won Anticipations.

Highly Technical Philosophical Arguments Of The Sort Many Philosophers Favor Are Absent Here. That Is Because I Have A Prior Problem To Deal With. I Have Learned That Arguments, No Matter How Watertight, Often Fall On Deaf Ears. I Am Myself The Author Of Arguments That I Consider Rigorous And Unanswerable But That Are Often Not Such Much Rebutted Or Even Dismissed As Simply Ignored.