Conclusion

In this chapter we have discussed some of the central questions of the philosophy of mind. We started by asking, “Can machines have minds?” But that led us to ask how we know that people have minds, and to think about the special kind of knowledge we seem to have of our own minds.

But I hope you will also entertain the possibility that these ten­sions in our thought reveal that we may need entirely new ways of thinking in order to understand what our brains are doing—even, perhaps, that we may end up giving up the idea of the mind alto­gether. After all, when Descartes began modern philosophy of mind, he did so by treating as a single category everything of which we can be directly conscious: but perceptions, beliefs, hopes, twinges, anxieties, emotions, wishes and desires—even as we nor­mally think of them—are a fairly diverse bunch of things. Perhaps it was a mistake to think that a single theory that covered all of them could be constructed. And, I have suggested, perhaps it was also a mistake to think that the deep puzzle is about the nature of the mind, rather than about the nature of matter. If, after all, as the best current theories of nature suggest, minds appear in the world through evolution in material organisms, then one of the facts about matter that needs explaining is that it can produce all the many diverse phenomena that we call “the mind.”