Coming out of that personal history of emphasis on the physiology of memory, how did I get to where I am now? The first step outward was by way of Artificial Intelligence. In college I had to decide between trying to build intelligent robots and trying to understand the brain, but having gone with the brain, I have always maintained an interest in computers. This allowed me to keep one foot inside the world of "cognitive science" while I concentrated on the molecular foundations of cognition. Of course, during the past 20 years, the molecules, computers, and cognitivists have all grown closer. The second step outward from brain physiology was by way of the interactions of people like Gerald Edelman, Francis Crick, And Terry Sejnowski with philosophers.  There was a revolution in biology about 10 years ago that made it possible for biologists to again start using words like "consciousness" which had been abandoned to the philosophers by an earlier generation of biologists.

My interactions with philosophers made me aware of a certain mind set that exists within philosophy that was beyond what I was familiar with as a scientist. My intuition about the utility of cooperation between scientists and philosophers was met harshly by the realities of disciplinary isolationism. I became interested in understanding the differences and similarities between philosophy and science. Thus, the need for a turn to history. Well, in History, one thing leads to another and before long you find yourself in a time machine going back to the point before there is written history. Before you can make sense of the start of written history, you have to make sense of our prehistorical origins. Form a starting "point" in mythology, you can try to trace the history of philosophy and science. Philosophy, taking for itself the domain of all things that are possible, is rather a large subject area. For me, the limiting focus is the path from philosophy to science. What is it that made Western Philosophy the path to science, not the Philosophy of some other culture like those of India or China?

There are some other threads that came together to contribute to this tapestry. I have always been interested in memetics, even before I learned the word "meme". Why do people become what they are: Catholics, Protestants, Consrvatives, Liberals, etc? And if such diversity is the ground state of human existence, then what can we expect for the future? Somehow, all the great human factions never had an appeal for me. I still wonder how human genes can make people conformists. Are we simply the product of millions of years of natural selection for conformity? Are the non-conformists just mutants or has natural selection allowed a fraction of humans to be non-conformists in order for human culture to grow? If the existing factions such as Catholics, Protestants, Consrvatives, Liberals are all just the products of tribalism, then can we form a new tribe that can rise above those fragmented old ways? I have always  enjoyed what I think of as "realistic fiction", believable extrapolations of the present into the future or the past to imagine how it might have been or how it might some day be. Issac Asimov's Foundation stories were an influential example of this type of fiction. In the Foundation stories, the question is raised, "Can we predict the future of human societies?" But when I grew up, I learned that "prediction" is irrelevant, all that matters is control. Can we control the future of human society? This is the field of memetic engineering.

I found that I could not escape the idea that if neuroscientists and philosophers of mind and cogntive scientists and roboticists could all get together and find out how our minds work then we would probably be on the path towards a better understanding of memetic engineering. That this was a Five Blind Men and the Elephant situation became apparent. Before we could really concern ourselves with the impact on society at large of a scientific understanding of mind, we first have to be concerned with the memetic engineering problem of forming a truely unified Science of Mind. From that point, it was an obvious step to begin collecting together all the various threads of such a hypthetical Science of Mind as part of a process of building consensus and unity.

Of course, any attempt to define who should be included within a Science of Mind must get involved with deciding who should be excluded. Certain pseudoscientific ideas swarm around the forming elements of any new science. They are part of the story, and learning about the history of sorting science from pseudoscience is one way to prepare for the effort of building a new science.

What about the method of preentation, the medium? I started out thinking about a book, but then the Internet came along. I endorse the idea that all of human knowledge should be freely available to everyone via the Internet.