The Mystery of Mind
Subtitle: A systematic and critical introduction to the philosophy of mind
Publisher: iUniverse, Inc.
Published: June 10, 2003
Language: eng
Number of pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780595273294
Subjects: Philosophy of Mind
Genres: Educational
First sentence: 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. <b>
Description: Book Description:

As a systematic and critical introduction to the philosophy of mind, The Mystery of Mind is about the trails and tribulations of the human mind toward understanding the wherewithal of its own realization. At issue is what is known in the philosophy of mind as the mind-body problem: how does a body support a mind with its brain? 

Pivotal to the book is the author's working out of a concept of mind that is user-friendly to the materialist cause. It is in contrast to the traditional concept of mind that many of us still implicitly subscribe. It is upon the strength of this adverbial concept that the author has come to hold that the conceptual gap between the neurobiological and the psycho-cognitive could in fact be bridged. It is also the author's contention that despite shortcomings of other materialist approaches that have been taken in our time, an intelligible case for the truth of materialism could still be made in the form of a biological emergent two-aspect scenario, i.e., when the adverbial concept of mind he advocates is also brought to bear.

All in all, what The Mystery of Mind offers is a systematic and critical introduction to one of the living philosophical issues that have engaged the human intellects for the last two and a half thousand years. This is also the central issue that has motivated research in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind in our time.
Notes: Peter M.K. Chan is the author of 
The Mystery of Mind (published 2003); 
Soul, God, and Morality (published 2004); and 
The Six Patriarchs of Chinese Humanism (not yet in print). 

For more information regarding the above, please visit
http://sites.google.com/site/pmkchan/home
http://patriarchsofchinesephilosophy.googlepages.com/home