Welcome to The Functional Mind. I’m Steve Wagar. There is a question that has followed me for fifty years. The way a good problem follows you: patiently, without urgency, certain that you will eventually turn around and face it properly.
The question is this: what are we, exactly?
Not in the biological sense; we have good answers there. Not in the spiritual sense; answers here are inherently personal and inexact. I mean in the scientific sense. What kind of thing is a mind? What kind of thing is a feeling, a thought, a self? And why has science, for all its extraordinary power, left these questions almost entirely unanswered?
I grew up in a household organized around large questions. My father, W. Warren Wagar, was a historian and futurist who wrote eighteen books and spent his life trying to understand where humanity was headed. He didn’t pass his conclusions on to me so much as his disposition. I learned to stand back far enough to see the shape of things. By the time I was twelve, I was spending long hours trying to work out how ideas fit together. Not any particular idea. The structure underneath all of them.
What I kept coming back to was this: we don’t know anything with certainty, but we aren’t lost in pure uncertainty either. We can build models of the world — careful, testable, revisable models — and some of them fit reality so well that we can act on them with confidence. The sun will rise. Not because we can prove it in some absolute sense, but because in every world likely to be relevant to us, it will. That framing, of probable worlds, functional models, earned confidence, became the lens through which I’ve thought about everything since.
I went to Yale intending to become a geneticist. Genetics seemed then, as it does now, like one of the deepest stores of important information in the world. But I discovered in the laboratory that I was constitutionally unsuited to the careful, narrow, justification-at-every-step work that experimental science requires. I am a generalist by nature. I think from the top down. I ended up with a double major in molecular biochemistry and computer science — one foot in the biological, one in the computational — and by graduation it was clear that the computational was where I was headed.
I spent the next three decades writing software. Financial software, mostly. First home finance software, then the pre-Internet at Prodigy.com, then complex derivative modeling, and finally data governance, the unglamorous but intellectually demanding work of making sure that thousands of data fields from dozens of systems mean the same thing when you put them together. It sounds far from the question that followed me. It wasn’t. Everything I did professionally was an exercise in the same problem: how do you build a coherent functional model on top of a physical substrate that doesn’t care about your model at all? How do you make meaning out of mechanism?
In the early 1990s, I started reading seriously about the mind. The Journal of Consciousness Studies launched in 1994 and I subscribed from the beginning. I read the philosophers and the neuroscientists and the cognitive scientists. And I was, I have to be honest, not impressed. Not because the work wasn’t careful or intelligent. It was both. But it seemed to me that everyone was trying to solve a problem they hadn’t quite located yet. They were arguing about consciousness before they had settled what a feeling was. They were debating free will before they had established what a decision was. The foundation was missing, and no amount of clever superstructure was going to compensate for that.
I started writing a book to explain the mind in 1996. I stopped when three young children and a demanding career made it clear I couldn’t do the work justice. I told myself that if the ideas were sound, they would keep. And I kept thinking, and kept reading, and kept the question close.
When I was laid off in 2016, I finally had what I had been waiting for: time. I wrote the book that became the foundation of what you’re about to read. I finished it in November 2021, after five years of work and dozens of rewrites of the foundational parts.
Then, in the space of two years, I lost my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, and my mother. And then my wife began showing the early signs of Lewy Body dementia, a disease that systematically dismantles the very thing I have spent my life trying to understand. The mind, taken apart from the inside, one function at a time.
I didn’t work on the book during those years. I couldn’t. But the question didn’t leave. It never does.
I came back to it this year, with the help of artificial intelligence tools that have become genuinely useful thinking partners, and with a clearer sense than ever of what I am trying to say and why it matters. The result is what you are now entering: The Functional Mind — a podcast, a newsletter, and ultimately a book that I hope will change the way you think about what you are.
I want to be honest with you about what this is and what it isn’t.
This is not self-help. I will not be offering you techniques for a better life, though I think understanding what a mind actually is might, as a side effect, help you live more clearly inside yours. This is not a work of popular neuroscience — I won’t be walking you through brain scans and explaining which regions light up when you feel afraid. The hardware is real and fascinating, but it is not where the answers live. And this is not philosophy in the traditional sense, though we will engage seriously with philosophers who have been working on these questions for centuries.
What this is, I think, is something that doesn’t quite have a name yet. A scientific framework for understanding life and mind that takes seriously both the physical and the functional, that refuses to reduce experience to mechanism, and equally refuses to treat experience as something beyond the reach of science. I call it functional science, and by the time we reach the end of this journey together, I hope the name will feel not like a label but like something you can clearly see.
We will build the argument one lesson at a time, each one earning the next. I will ask you to hold your questions as we go — not to suppress them, but to trust that the framework will answer them in order. Some of what I say early on will feel incomplete. It is. We are building something, and buildings require foundations before they have roofs.
The question that has followed me for fifty years is, I believe, answerable. Not completely — no honest scientist claims complete answers. But answerable enough to matter. Answerable enough to change how you see yourself, and what you take yourself to be.
That is what I’m offering. Let’s begin.
