Losing Our Heads

Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, famously said that minds are simply what brains do. Minsky’s credo has become a truism; it not only expresses our commitment to a scientific understanding of the mind but also captures the familiar idea that a deep theory can only come from a science of the brain.

It is also a truism, however, that truisms often start out life as controversies, and so it is with Minsky’s. Until recently, in fact, the brain was of little interest to those concerned with mental life. The agenda for the theory of the mind was set by the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who believed that the mind was a soul that resided apart from the physical world. According to Descartes, then, there could not be a science of the mind, much less a neuroscience of the mind. Theoretical work had to be done to move from Descartes’s view to Minsky’s statement of contemporary common sense, and that work was done in...