EMOTIONS AND THE SELF
Much of the perplexity that motivates modern discussion of the
nature of mind derives indirectly from the striking success of
physical explanation. Not only has physics itself advanced at a
remarkable pace in the last four centuries; every hope has been
held out that, in principle, all science can be understood and
ultimately studied in terms of mechanisms proper to physics.
Seeing all natural phenomena as explicable in terms appropriate to
physics, however, makes the mental seem to be a singularity in
nature. Chemistry and biology may well be reducible to physics,
but the same seems hardly possible for the mental. The gulf
between mind and physics seems too great to bridge, and the success
of physics guarantees its standing. The place of mind in nature is
thereby rendered problematic. This line of reasoning has tempted
thinkers since Descartes to see the mind as not only independent of
other natural phenomena, but as even somehow lying......
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