Neither Brain nor Ghost: A Non-Dualist Alternative to the Mind-Brain Identity Theory

[C C]

http://www.cognitivequestions.org/contents.htm

EXCERPT: Gives a précis of the book, and describes how its thesis arises in response to the post-analytic neurophilosophy of the Churchlands, and how it resembles the Pragmatism of Dewey. Defines Cartesian Materialism (in contrast to Dennett’s definition) as being the claim that the mind is a particular part of the nervous system that occupies the skull, and explains why this is not the only possible alternative to dualism. [...] We cannot save Cartesian Materialism by positing a mind-nervous system identity, rather than a mind-brain identity. This chapter describes evidence that the mind is hormonal as well as neural. Any attempt to make a principled distinction between these hormonal activities as physical and the neural activities as mental seems doomed-- which makes it difficult to ignore the possibility that almost anything that takes place within the skin has some claim to being part of the embodiment of mind....

[Magical Realist]

In order to fully understand such a system, however, we must in Port and Van Gelder’s words, recognize that “the cognitive system cannot be simply the encapsulated brain; rather it is a single unified system embracing the . . . nervous system, body, and environment".

Being-in-the-world or Dasien in Heideigger's terms. Consciousness is a distributed, dynamic, and situational being inherently transcendental to itself thru the Kantian constructs of space and time.

“And so man, as existing transcendence abounding in and surpassing toward possibilities, is a creature of distance. Only through the primordial distances he establishes toward all being in his transcendence does a true nearness to things flourish in him.” ― Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons