Any Questions?

by Nancy Sherer

No one doubts that since the human brain first had the leisure to contemplate, that the most urgent question was ‘what am I?' Human consciousness has always attempted to arrange the universe around the simple fact of our own existence. That the universe would exist without us, or at least some form of life is simply to silly to contemplate. So people wondered why, but never expected to find an answer, except possibly after death (which it seems to me to be a little too late to be helpful.) Still, some great thinkers actually made a living by pondering the question and reporting back to other, more immediately occupied, members of their society.

Religious speculation gave some possibilities. Logic, in various systems, gave other possibilities. The most ingenious thinkers, after spending way too much time alone, came up with redundancies such as "I think, therefore I am" or non-responses such as "no one can know the mind of god." For a hundred thousand years there could be no sure answer to the question of ‘who am I?'

In the middle of the 19th century, Darwin's simple explanation of evolution made thousands of centuries of philosophers' painfully-detailed vagaries obsolete. Whether rationalist or religionist, and no matter how great a thinker, there can be no understanding of the human condition without understanding evolution. Human knowledge has moved beyond philosophy in light of the simple fact that life is a chemical reaction rather than a mystery.

Likewise, with new technology, we now can discard soft social sciences. No more dichotomies of mind and body need be contemplated. Throw away Freudian ego and id. They don't exist even under the slackest of definitions. Throw away your concepts of neurosis. Psychotherapy now belongs in the same category as phrenology. The realm of the mind has become the realm of science, and we are as close to understanding our brains as we are to understanding our lungs, liver, and pancreas. Your hopes, loves, fears, joy, sadness, ambition, and intellectual curiosity are biological functions. Already science has mapped out many of these functions and theorized on how they work. We are within years of having scientific answers to ancient philosophical questions, but one question remains: Can we cope with the answer?