It is a curious fact that we have successfully
used our minds to penetrate profound secrets of the physical universe; but when
it comes to grasping the nature of our minds, we are baffled.[i] This is the famous mind-body problem,
the “hard” problem being to account for our consciousness, which is utterly
unlike anything physical. The
mind, it seems, has a hard time trying to understand itself.
In this essay, I
describe how I evolved my view of the subject, which is deeply at odds with mainstream
physicalism. Without putting a
label on my view, there were two kinds of crucial step I had to take, theoretical
and empirical.