ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes some of the areas of contention, and makes clear what he mean by mind. Modern thinking about the mind goes back to the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century. The author identifies three reasons for rejecting the idea of mind as something non-physical and locating mind within the brain. The first is that science has found no way of explaining how something non-physical could interact with our physical body and bring about our actions. The second reason for rejecting a non-physical mind is that we see evidence that some animals have a mind, and we are led to the conclusion that the mind in humans evolved through natural selection. The third reason for rejecting a non-physical mind is that with modern methods of scanning the brain, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, we can watch thinking taking place within the human brain.
