A Worldly Mind: Natural History and the Experience of Consciousness

Research into the physical foundations of consciousness and the theories that attempt to organize these data into a philosophically meaningful context continue to be guided by deeply-engrained Western habits of thought and terminology. The guidance I speak of, however, is bewildered: it continues to lead us to the brink of a chasm separating experience and physiology, thought and neurons, mind and brain.

Like many others, the so-called “mind-body problem” is an historical, semantic, and self-insistent paradox. It happens like this: we believe ourselves to be physical beings, but we also believe that we are conscious beings whose awareness of physical beings cannot be physical. It would seem that we are both physical and non-physical: the problem is, how do the physical and non-physical relate, how does the physical lead to the non-physical, or how does the non-physical lead to the physical? Since by definition the physical and the non-physical have no means of communication or relationship, we have a problem.