In order to have a full neural theory of human thinking, we would need to have explanations of how
the brain carries out the most high-level, creative kinds of thought. Theories are just beginning to be
developed of how the brain manages its most impressive feats, like solving challenging problems,
writing novels, composing music, and creating scientific theories. There are rough ideas about how
the brain manages to be creative, but nothing yet that could count as a mechanistic explanation. How
does the brain form new scientific concepts, such as sound wave, electron, and gene? How can
groups of neurons generate new hypotheses, like the idea that species evolve by natural selection?
More mundanely, how do neurons carry out basic forms of inference such as deduction, generalization
from examples, and analogy? The present shortage of available answers to these questions is not
evidence against the hypothesis that minds are brains. That much remains to be understood about
thunderstorms does not undermine the fact that identification of lightning with atmospheric electrical
discharge has had great explanatory success. Every scientific theory is incomplete in that there are
some relevant phenomena that it cannot explain, but such gaps become evidence against a theory only
when an alternative theory arises that can fill them by explaining the phenomena. The view that minds
are souls cannot explain creativity and high-level inference either, and lacks any prospects for
explanatory progress.