I may be wrong that minds are brains. Perhaps I will be amazed after my final, fatal heart attack to
discover that I can still think without my body, and will realize that this whole book has been a
mistake. Less drastically, new evidence may arise in the form of many well-controlled experiments
concerning communications from the dead or paranormal powers that cannot be explained by any
hypothesis assuming that only matter and energy exist. Then the Brain Revolution that overturns our
dualist conceptual scheme would not need to proceed, and people would be able to feel secure in
their view that there is more to us than our bodies. Religion and commonsense dualism could
legitimately survive. We would not have to give up the highly appealing conceptual scheme that offers
us immortality, a caring God, free will, and our experienced centrality to the universe.
But currently available evidence suggests otherwise. This chapter gave a quick sketch of why the
best explanation of mental processes such as perception, memory, learning, and drug experiences is
that they are processes of the brain. I refrained from going into a lot more detail about how the brain
supports these kinds of thinking because I wanted the reader to grasp the overall structure of the
argument that minds are brains. Much more detailed explanations can be found in chapters that follow
and in the extensive literature in cognitive neuroscience.
In contrast, I described the dubious nature of proposed evidence for dualism based on
communications from the dead, near-death experiences, and parapsychological capacities such as
extrasensory perception. The one serious psychological phenomenon that might seem to require
dualist explanation is consciousness, but we will see in Chapter 5 that neuroscience is beginning to
understand how brains can have conscious experiences. Thought experiments about zombies provide
no impediment to adopting the hypothesis that mental processes are brain process, nor do concerns
with the computational and embodied nature of thinking.
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.