Publisher's Synopsis
This book is an interdisciplinary theoretical effort to explain the mind-body problem. Conscious mind is the hard problem to be explained and is the utmost existential question for any scientific mind. Neither a reductionist identity theory nor a commonsense-religious dualism can answer the problem. Human cognitive system can have a natural explanation rather than a religious description. To reduce the mind as what the brain does is too premature and to separate the mind and brain as two independent realities is too trivial. The hypothesis of the book identifies the conscious mind with the emergent functionality of the human brain. And, this is definitely an approximate guess. This informed guess is a challenge to many previously established theories and is an invitation for further research. It demystifies the age old homunculus mind and does not explains it away. To elaborate the theme, the author has incorporated themes such as complex system dynamics, evolution, cosmology, thermodynamics, information and emergence. Mind and brain are neither two dichotomized substances nor are they one and same substance.The hypothesis of the book is that the self-reflexive conscious subject, which simulates itself and models a virtual world, is the emergent functionality or the teleos of the entire brain. The universe, which itself is a matter-energy-information system, at least in one occasion, becomes conscious of itself through humans.
