The solution is still uncertain, but two lines of thought look promising. First we need to ask ourselves whether we are really clear what it is we are asking science to explain. “Mind”, “awareness”, “experience” and “soul” are scarcely terms of science: our understanding of them is permeated by millennia of religious and philosophical thought and assumptions. We are intensely imaginative creatures — indeed, the capacity to detach ourselves from the here and now, to lose ourselves in imaginings, is one of our most characteristically human traits. We need to ask whether some things we tend to take for granted about our mental lives may be imaginative fictions. For example, the comforting and tenacious idea that we are animated by an invisible, immaterial, imperishable soul remains profoundly influential — even, I suspect, for those of us who accept that it is no more than a wonderful myth. It is liable to send us off in pursuit of a “neuroscience of the soul” that is sure to disappoint us.
The second line of thought is linked. When we gaze at the brain and ask how its 100 billion nerve cells can give rise to experience — rather as Aladdin’s lamp produces its genie — we may be depriving ourselves of just the resources we need to understand our mental lives. In the ordinary way, brains are not conscious — people are. The brain enables consciousness, for sure, but perhaps our metaphors mislead us when we ask how it “generates” it. Typically the life of the mind is “embodied, extended and embedded”: our brains interact with our bodies, our bodies move through our surroundings over time, and our experience is embedded in the culture that shapes it. Trying to explain human experience without reference to our human bodies, our physical surroundings or our culture may be asking too much of the brain.
