Sublime

Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no

I want to reemphasize the miraculous existence of any form of consciousness by paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein: Not how consciousness is, is mystical, but that it is.

That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation.

Therefore, and this is critical, strict physicalism cannot be established by showing that mental states and brain states are interdependent on, causally related, or constantly conjoined with each other in an embodied person. Physicalism needs identity to make its case, and if something is true, or possibly true of a mental substance, property, or

What is, and should be, controversial is the proposal that our theory of the calculations that the brain carries out match up, in some fairly direct way, with our common-sense psychological explanation in terms of beliefs and desires and the like – a viewpoint that has been widely held ever since early computational models of the mind took hold in