Philosophy of Mind: Brains, Consciousness and Thinking Machines (The Great Courses: Philosophy & Intellectual History)

Nothing in the universe is more mysterious than the inner workings of the human mind.•Do other people have a mind like yours and, if so, how do you know?•Is your mind something distinct from your body, or do ordinary physiological processes produce minds?•Can a machine have a mind?•What is consciousness?•Do you have free will?•Is everything you are now experiencing actually happening, or is that an elaborate illusion created by the mind?The mind reels at such questions! But philosophy provides powerful tools for investigating the mysteries of thinking, feeling, and perceiving.What Is Your Mind?The attempt to understand consciousness is the ultimate imperative in philosophical thought and stems from the ancient Greek aphorism, "know thyself." A simple statement, it nevertheless has vast ramifications for how we understand not only ourselves, but also the people around us.History's most profound thinkers have spent their lives attempting to answer the deceptively simple question, "what is the mind?" including Aristotle in antiquity, René Descartes in the 17th century, and William James in the 19th century.Questions about the nature of the mind are among the most hotly debated in philosophy today. Today, we are beginning to see the true complexity of this pursuit, as philosophers draw on the latest evidence from neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and other fields to probe still deeper into the inner workings of the mind.One of the most exciting research partnerships in recent decades has been the interdisciplinary study of the mind called cognitive science. It draws on neuroscience to chart how bundles of neurons create minds, psychology to illuminate how minds function, linguistics to explain how minds generate language, artificial intelligence to attempt to reproduce the output of our minds, and other fields to cover the big picture.