collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections. If, however, the mind is nothing but a calculating machine, then it is subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem, which leads to the thorny fact that numbers possess at least some properties that are beyond the power of the human mind to establish: “So this

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They suggest instead that, where the mind is concerned, we need a fundamental distinction of the subjective from the objective (roughly, an inside/private view of the mind versus an outside/public one). This distinction supports dualism, for which consciousness depends on the brain but isn’t identical with it. Dualism is opposed to materialism,

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Past philosophers have taken this observation and run with it, arguing that minds and brains are fundamentally distinct and separate phenomena. This is the view the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”1 But modern scientists and philosophers who have rejected dualism haven’t necessarily replaced it with a better

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