It is rather surprising to hear a psychologist like Stephen Pinker say (How the Mind Works, 1997] that religion and philosophy are "fascinating but biologically functionless activities." Isn't it obvious that we need religion and/or philosophy?

Even if the answers they provide are wrong, we need some kind of plausible answers to the "holistic," orientational questions about life. That is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that humans require not just perception but concepts for successful living. We see beyond the here and now, and we need guidelines, a mental framework, a model to steer us--for better or worse--through our day to day decisions and actions. People without such a view of the world are, in a very important way, maladapted--adrift without a rudder and in danger of crashing.

Granted, having such a philosophy of life, correct or not, is not guarantee that one will not end up on the rocks, anway. But the odds are in favor of people who at least try to understand the world they live in and who at least think they know its basic nature. Bewildered, disoriented creatures are, to repeat, maladapted.

Philosophy is not a luxury, but a necessity--even in the form of its protean ancestor, religion. Philosophy is a quintessentially human adaptation--not for solving specific life problems, but for solving the "holistic" problem of determining what kind of life to live.

Yet, presumably since their fundamental problems have resisted consensus solution for 2500 years, Pinker suspects that these philosophy and religion are at least partly "the application of mental tools to problems they were not designed to solve" (p. 525) Perhaps they weren't, but why couldn't these mental tools be "exapted" to solving those problems anyway?

Pinker suggests that they are not "sufficiently similar to the mundane survival challenges of our ancestors" (p. 525), and that is why people have pondered the nature of subjective experience, the self, free will, meaning, knowledge, and morality for millenia "but have made no progress in solving them." Our minds are well suited to perceiving objects and motion and to discovering causal laws in parts of the universe, but their very excellence at meeting those challenges may have compromised them for dealing with the "peculiarly holistic" kinds of problems as the nature of sentience and will.

Far from being too complicated, they are maddeningly simple--consciousness and choice inhere in a special dimension or coloring that is somehow pasted onto neural events without meshing with their causal machinery. The challenge is not to discover the correct explanation of how that happens, but to imagine a theory that could explain how it happens, a theory that would place the phenomenon as an effect of some cause, any cause. [p. 562]

If this were indeed an inherent limitation of our kind of consciousness, then Pinker would be right: we should rejoice at all that our minds make possible and let go of the perennial, insoluble conundrums. But such a surrender is not warranted by a mere hypothesis born of frustration and impatience--and the facts argue against it, as well.

The vast increase in research into brain function and conscious processes in just the past few decades has led to numerous discoveries and insights, and the writings of researchers and philosophers such as Roger Sperry, Edward Pols, Antonio Damasio, Jerome Kagan, Fred Dretske, Henry B. Veatch, and Panayot Butchvarov increasingly point the way to a non-dualistic, non-reductionist, naturalistic understanding of the self and the will, and of the other basic issues as well. Pinker's own impressive work is a prime exhibit in support of this more optimistic scenario.

Especially considering how long religion's supernaturalist premises and theocratic controls over society have impeded scientific discovery, two and a half millenia is not nearly as long a time as it may seem. (What could we measure it against, anyway?) Moreover, as just noted, it is not true that there has been no progress in solving these problems.

It may well be that the standing problems of mankind simply require a lot more hard work, and that science and philosophy must pool their efforts in order to solve them. This assumption has gotten us a long way already, and there is no good reason not to continue confidently down that road.

REB