Critical notice : Decontaminating our view of the mind

I suppose that most people think their minds are inside their heads, and not spread around in the environment outside. Now that we are not able to make sense of the old Cartesian doctrine that minds exist in some non-material realm this looks like the only option; our minds are lodged in our brains. Perhaps we have learnt enough from Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) attack on the very meaningfulness of this way of talking about minds that we might modify our way of putting this. What we would say instead is that facts about the mental depend on facts about the brain. To put it more technically, the mental supervenes on the neurophysiological. This means roughly that if any of the facts about your mind were different then some neurophysiological fact about your brain would have to be different too; facts about the mind do not float free from facts about the brain.