What we need to do now is analyze, right down to the simplest core concepts, what it is about living and reproducing organisms that introduces the notion of objective value. Providing this analysis, I believe, is my signal contribution to metaethics.

How can we tell something is a value? Before deciding to join the ranks of professional philosophers, probably the best answer to this metaethical question I had found was Ayn Rand's (paraphrased): A value is what one acts to gain or to keep.

Right off, I should say that this isn't wholly satisfactory. Some people, for example, act to gain or keep a continual state of profound inebriation, or an anorexic figure. Such things, I hope you'll agree, are not real values, but false or illusory ones. They seem to be values only when our ability to value aptly is impaired in some way.

On the other hand, when we are valuing aptly, the way we have been designed to value under conditions familiar to generations of our ancestors, our valuing is probably an apt response to some objective value in the world -- to food, or safety, or companionship, or any number of things that normally help our kind survive and reproduce. Under such circumstances, what we act to gain or to keep truly is a value.

Now for the tricky part. How can we tell, in the absence of any creatures sporting evolved valuing mechanisms, whether something is a value or not? Were there no values before vertebrates developed the ability to appreciate them?

Nah.

I'll bet you'll agree with me (regardless of how radical or even distasteful you think my views are) that Life must have been a value even before living organisms came to appreciate their existence -- and not just because we, 3 billion years later, have decided (as our own judgment or opinion) that it was valuable all along! But what is it about Life that would justify that view?

Is there something that mindless Life would act to gain or keep?

Yes. Life has demonstrably acted to keep existing as Life -- the process of "begetting begetters" -- for about 3.5 billion years now. And Life even acts to gain new ways (new branches, new species) to flourish, by introducing random genetic variations.

None of this is intentional; it's simply stuff that Life does. Not only that, but doing this stuff is what makes Life Life. And here's where my brand of functionalism has important implications for the philosophy of biology.

Life actually does things -- works -- to be what it is. Think about it: nothing else in the universe (save certain ideas -- what Richard Dawkins calls 'memes') has this property. Galaxies, planetary systems, rocks, inorganic molecules, atoms ... NOTHING else does actual work just to continue being what it IS.

I have coined a name for the physical property of working to continue being the sort of thing that one is: reflexive functionality. Readers with a good background in English will recognize the term 'reflexive' as applying to pronouns like 'myself', or verbs like 'am'. And students of mathematics or logic will remember the reflexive property of functions such as the identity function (a=a).

Reflexivity is something directed toward oneself.

Life, as the first instance of reflexive functionality in the universe, has done something remarkable. It has created (totally by random accident) another form of reflexive functionality: living organisms. Organisms work to continue being organisms -- to continue living! If you want to get technical, they work to maintain a homeodynamic process of maintaining functional integrity. Living organisms are simply ways that Life has hit upon, accidentally, to continue being Life. If you think about it, living for an extended period offers a huge reproductive advantage. After all, you can't reproduce if you're not alive, and the longer you're alive and capable of reproduction, the more progeny you're likely to beget. Living is a tremendous asset for reproduction!

We are Life's tools.

That's the biological reality, but it needn't be the final word. Indeed, an on-the-ball philosopher might have wondered whether I were committing the Genetic Fallacy (loosely speaking, the mistaken argument that if something is designed to do one job, that's the end of the story). We are incredibly sophisticated tools -- and we're actually capable of setting our own goals, defining our own purposes, and generally taking off on a tangent from our biological orbit. This is because Life has developed, in our ancestors, intentionality: the ability to impose aboutness on mental processes related to stuff in our environment.

Not only have organisms been able to develop images or feelings that are about things in their environment, but the more sophisticated among them (including us) have developed ideas that are about our reactions to, or judgments of, the things in our environment.

What have we been doing with these sophisticated capabilities? Well, I'm afraid it's pretty embarrassing. By and large, we have been rationalizing the pursuit of our drives, desires, and even whims for their own sakes -- just because of the ways we like to feel.

Structuralism Warning!!

The notion that mental states are important in their own right -- that things like pleasure and happiness are goals to be sought (and pain, discomfort, and sorrow are to be avoided) is structuralist in nature.

Now, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I have yet to write to complete this section -- so please bear with me. Meanwhile, why not forge ahead and look at the outrageous things I have to say about how functionalism applies to the various branches of philosophy?