[...]... several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, probed them all the way through They’re completely meat.” “That’s impossible What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?” “They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them The signals come from machines.” “So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.” “They made the machines... and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being, but how or why, no mortal may ever know —William James Principles of Psychology, Chapter VI What is mind? No matter What is matter? Never mind —T H Key Of all the thousands of pages and millions of words devoted to the puzzle of the mind and the brain, to the mystery of how something as sublime and insubstantial... of the brain as the seat of sensation, writing in his treatise on seizures: “I consider that the brain has the most power for man… The eyes and ears and tongue and hands and feet do whatsoever the brain determines…it is the brain that is the messenger to the understanding [and] the brain that interprets the understanding.” Although Aristotle and the Stoics rejected this finding (seating thought in the. .. mechanisms, the patient could exercise the power to make a choice about whether the next idea the brain attends to will be “I am going to work in the garden now,” rather than “I am going to wash my hands again.” Although the passive stream of the contents of consciousness may well be determined by brain mechanism, the mental and emotional response to that stream may not be The OCD patient, in other words, may... anything other than brain mechanisms in and of themselves constitute the causal dynamics of a mental phenomenon is to risk being dismissed out of hand But there was another problem For decades, a key tenet of neuroscience held that although the organization and wiring of the infant brain are molded by its environment, the functional organization and structure of the adult brain are immutable Experiments... what I m trying to tell you Meat made the machines.” “That’s ridiculous How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.” “I m not asking you, I m telling you These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made of meat.” “Maybe they’re like the Orfolei You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.” “Nope They’re born meat and they... in the Epilogue, we attempt to come to terms with why any of this matters One important answer is that the materialist-determinist model of the brain has profound implications for notions like moral responsibility and personal freedom The interpretation of mind that dominates neuroscience is inimical to both For if we truly believe, when the day is done, that our mind and all that term entails the. .. themselves They have had patients bring in a piece of toilet paper soiled with a minuscule amount of their fecal material and rub it on their face and through their hair during the therapy session and then, at home, contaminate objects around the house with it In other cases, patients are prevented from washing their hands for days at a time, even after using the bathroom To me, this all seemed cruel and. .. as the latest discovery of genes that “cause” risk taking, or shyness, or happiness, or impulsivity—or any of the dozens of human behavioral traits that are now being correlated with the chemical messages encoded on our twisting strands of DNA Let us turn to the duality of mind and brain { ONE } THE MATTER OF MIND Nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, ... Wang, Martin Wax and Anton Zeilinger We thank Christophe Blumrich for the care he took in producing the compelling artwork and, most of all, Judith Regan, Susan Rabiner, and Calvert Morgan for their commitment to this project To those whom we have forgotten to mention (and we know you’re out there), our apologies { INTRODUCTION } Hamlet: My father, methinks I see my father Horatio: O! where, my lord? .