Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder, but he was only partly right. For many thinkers such as
Camus, philosophy begins in anxiety, the intense and hard-to-overcome feeling that life may be
meaningless, absurd, irrational, futile, and lacking in morality. Modern science helps enormously to
satisfy the feeling of wonder, by providing answers to questions about what is strange and surprising
in the natural world. But science may seem to be helpless to deal with anxiety about lack of meaning
in people's lives, and indeed may even increase such anxiety. Suppose physics is right that our universe began around fourteen billion years ago in a big bang that produced billions of stars; and
suppose biology is right that human beings are just a kind of highly evolved ape. Then our lives
cannot have the special, central place in the universe promised by religion based on faith, and by
philosophy based on a priori reasoning. Hence it is unsurprising that the Brain Revolution encounters
opposition from those who fear its practical as well as its intellectual consequences.
This book aims to show that neural naturalism can serve to satisfy wonder about the nature of mind
and reality, and also to alleviate anxiety about the difficulty of life in a vast and apparently
purposeless universe. Philosophy and neuropsychology can do little to remove the many hardships
that people face as their lives develop, with inevitable bouts of failure, rejection, disease, and
eventually death. But together philosophy and science can paint a plausible picture of how minds,
even ones that are merely brains, can apprehend reality, decide effectively, act morally, and lead
meaningful lives enriched by worthwhile goals in the realms of love, work, and play. To begin this
picture, we need to understand how scientific evidence provides a better source of knowledge than
does religious faith or pure reason.