ABSTRACT
Many people have a notion that the mind is in the brain or even that it is the brain. The mind is what the brain does, as it is sometimes expressed. The psychological realm is perceived as something intracranial, something "inside the head". There are a lot of exaggerated, science-fiction conclusions and hot air in the debate about the brain and the mind. This chapter shows that it is simply philosophically and scientifically untenable to say that "we are our brains". It argues that this notion of the brain has questionable ideological effects on our society. An extremely radical thesis about the brain and the mind called eliminative materialism was developed in the last few decades of the twentieth century. Cognitive science in general and cognitive neuroscience specifically form the core paradigm in contemporary psychology upon which the basic empirical research and theory development has been based in recent years.
