The Brain Revolution requires a substantial change in widely accepted theories and concepts. Our
beliefs and other representations need to be reconceived as patterns of activation in neural
populations, which requires understanding them as processes rather than things. Inference is a neural
process involving parallel interactions among neural populations, not just a step-by-step linguistic
procedure. Most generally, minds and selves need to be conceived as processes operating in relation
to the world and other minds, not just as things. Shifting to understanding the world in terms of
relational processes rather than things and simple properties has been a major part of the
development of science, as in Newton's recognition that weight is a relation between objects, and the
recognition of thermodynamic theory that heat is a process of motion of molecules.
More difficult even than such reclassifications are the emotional conceptual changes we must
embrace to shift from the attractive picture of minds as immortal souls central to the universe to the
biological picture of minds as neural processes of no apparent cosmic significance. I hope that
Chapter 7 will ease such emotional transitions by showing how understanding brains can help us to
appreciate how minds nevertheless can find and create meaning through the pursuit of love, work, and
play, reducing the lure of dualism. This biological picture need not be at all dismal and can suggest
effective means of increasing human well-being.
All the evidence that minds are brains justifies pursuing wisdom, meaning, and other philosophical
questions from a neuroscientific perspective. Let us now see what attention to brains can tell us about
reality.