Reductionism Is Merciless.

Enormous Numbers Of People Are Taken In, Or At Least Beguiled And Fascinated, By What Seems To Me To Be Unbelievable Hocum, And Relatively Few Are Concerned With Or Thrilled By The Astounding-yet True-facts Of Science, As Put Forth In The Pages Of, Say, Scientific American.

In Fact, A Sense Of Essence Is, In Essence, The Essence Of Sense, In Effect.

You Can Never Represent Yourself Totally .... To Seek Self -knowledge Is To Embark On A Journey Which ... Will Always Be Incomplete, Cannot Be Charted On A Map, Will Never Halt, Cannot Be Described.

The Proverbial German Phenomenon Of The Verb-at-the-end About Which Droll Tales Of Absentminded Professors Who Would Begin A Sentence, Ramble On For An Entire Lecture, And Then Finish Up By Rattling Off A String Of Verbs By Which Their Audience, For Whom The Stack Had Long Since Lost Its Coherence, Would Be Totally Nonplussed, Are Told, Is An Excellent Example Of Linguistic Recursion.

Perhaps The Problem Is The Seeming Need That People Have Of Making Black-and-white Cutoffs When It Comes To Certain Mysterious Phenomena, Such As Life And Consciousness. People Seem To Want There To Be An Absolute Threshold Between The Living And The Nonliving, And Between The Thinking And The "merely Mechanical," ... But The Onward March Of Science Seems To Force Us Ever More Clearly Into Accepting Intermediate Levels Of Such Properties.