us—not for it—to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects.
While there were many “philosophy and the mind” or “philosophy and psychology” courses offered when I was an undergrad, there were few philosophy and neuroscience courses to be found. Bennett and Hacker’s book was recommended to me my junior year by a TA named Fred who had once called me “unnerving and untraditional,” which I took to mean that he thought I asked too many of the wrong kinds of questions. I’m fairly certain he gave me the book to get me out of his office hours, if not forever, then at least for the length of time it would take me to read it. I had never thought of my scientific questions, my religious questions, as philosophical questions, but nonetheless, I went back to my dorm’s common room, opened the book, and read until I was bleary-eyed and exhausted. I was back in Fred’s office the next week.
“I know that psychology and neuroscience have to work in concert if we want to address the full range of human behavior, and I really do love the idea of the whole animal, but I guess my question is that if the brain can’t account for things like reason and emotion, then what can? If the brain makes it possible for ‘us’ to feel and think, then what is ‘us’? Do you believe in souls?” I was breathless. Fred’s office was a long walk from my last class, and I had jogged there to try to catch him before he left for lunch.
“Gifty, I actually haven’t read the book. I just thought you might like it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’ll give it a read if you want to talk about it with me, though,” he said.
“That’s all right,” I said, inching away. “Do you want the door open or closed?”
I took the long way home from Fred’s office, wondering if it was too late to change my mind and become a doctor. At least then I could look at the body and see a body, look at a brain and see a brain, not a mystery that can never be solved, not an “us” that can never be explained. All of my years of Christianity, of considering the heart, the soul, and the mind with which Scripture tells us to love the Lord, had primed me to believe in the great mystery of our existence, but the closer I tried to get to uncovering it, the further away the objects moved. The fact that I can locate the part of the brain where memory is stored only answers questions of where and perhaps even how. It does little to answer the why. I was always, I am ever, unnerved.
* * *
—
This is something I would never say in a lecture or a presentation or, God forbid, a paper, but, at a certain point, science fails. Questions become guesses become philosophical ideas about how something should probably, maybe, be. I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, this idea that one must necessarily choose between science and religion, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.
“You’re not serious,” Anne said that day in Integrated Science when I revealed my former Jesus freak. She’d spent our entire friendship performing a kind of evangelism of her own, trying to disabuse me of my faith. I didn’t need her help; I’d been doing that work on my own for years.
“Do you believe in evolution?” she asked one sunny spring day. We had dragged a couple of picnic blankets out onto the lawn so that we could study in the sunshine. It was among the happiest times of my life. And though we argued all the time and though we wouldn’t stay friends for much longer, she knew me better than anyone had ever known me. Even my mother, flesh of my flesh,