PHILOSOPHICAL debate about the nature of mind used to be the preserve of 鈥渂etweeded鈥� inhabitants of senior common rooms. No longer. The fall of mind-body dualism and the rise of reductionist neurobiology 鈥� along with artificial intelligence, neural networks and other hip pursuits 鈥� has seen to that. The big challenge now is how to bridge the gap between lab neuroscience and library philosophy; how to reconcile the cortical maps, pattern generators and neurotransmitter pathways that are the meat and drink of neuroscience with the theories of self, intentionality and so on that sustain philosophers. In short, how to make tweed jackets and brain scanners produce a unified picture of mind.
Never the twain shall meet, some might say. But this isn鈥檛 the overriding message of A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, pp 642, $79.95, 拢60). Here, scholarly entries on the nature of semantics and the human imagination lie cheek-by-jowl with hard-nosed expositions of neural-network type models of perception. And helping you to find out who thinks what and why are a dozen or so self-profiles penned by heavy weights such as Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett and Jerry Fodor.
A bluffer鈥檚 guide to this tome most certainly isn鈥檛. If you want to find out what 鈥渜ualia鈥� are, or why snoring is not an 鈥渁ction鈥� but merely a 鈥渄oing鈥�, then be prepared to wade through several pages of sometimes dense reasoning. The text occasionally slips into sleep-inducing technobabble. And there are, inevitably, some episodes of uninspired academic tail-catching. But an invaluable guide, nevertheless. Moreover, there are even one or two explanatory diagrams.
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