Problems with the Mind-Brain problem

For decades, the mind-brain problem has been the object of intense debate in the realms of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. This article relates to the polemic involving the leading representative of analytical philosophy, Thomas Nagel, who has formulated the main difficulties of the mind-brain problem in their most clear and complete manner and outlined the means of a possible solution. Nagel, however, believes that modern science and philosophy does not possess the necessary conceptual tools; they are not yet known to us and a quest for them is a thing for the future. Unlike Thomas Nagel, the author of this article believes that such conceptual tools are indeed known and sufficient to overcome the principle difficulties of the mind-brain problem. This is shown with reference to the information approach, which affords an explanation of the connection of mental states with brain processes, explanation of mental causality and free will, and which offers a basis for prospects of decoding the brain codes of subjective-reality phenomena.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.