The ghost in the machine?

it is a marvellous feat of circular reasoning to claim that the mind is “non-physical”. Surely it is telling that, when prompted to provide examples of non-physical things in order to explain the concept, most of the examples that spring to mind are the very things that we are trying to explain: thoughts, memories, ideas, emotions.

To me, this observation strongly suggests that the idea of non-physicality is actually meaningless, despite its apparently obvious meaning which has seduced our intuition for centuries.

It is often argued that the mind cannot be non-physical, since then it could not cause physical events in the body. However, if non-physicality is meaningless, we need not even get into that discussion.

The working of the mind must therefore be grounded in the physical processes of the brain. Nobody yet understands how these physical processes “give rise to” experiences in the mind, but that is not a good reason to be lazy and explain them away as non-physical.