The Mystery of Mind

About this book

This book is about the trials and tribulations of the human mind toward understanding the wherewithal of its own realization. At issue is this mystery. How is it possible for a material thing such as a body-brain to become conscious, remember, and think? Nowadays, most of us would take for granted that one’s cognitive capacities are indeed dependent on the operations of one’s body-brain. Yet, it is not easy to understand how the cognitive nature of mind could possibly have arisen solely from the interaction of mere material constituents and their processes. Thus enters the question: what reasons do we have to believe that body-brains alone are really sufficient to generate the phenomena of consciousness and mind? The purpose of this book is to show why an intelligible answer to the question is much more difficult than ordinarily assumed, and to see whether or not and to what extent this explanatory difficulty could in fact be overcome.