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.