One must bear in mind that this book was published in 2001, while its subject has made leaps and bounds (though perhaps not towards the goal it seeks). As an introductory text, I feel that Clark's prose finds the right median between the colloquial and the lofty. It's a great overview of the history of philosophy of mind and the major debates. For me, the most intriguing debate is the one that found its launching pad in Descartes back in the early seventeenth century: there is a dualism that represents the material body and the immaterial body; but this also presents a problem regarding how the two are linked in such as a way as to effect causality.

The book is very much Andy Clark's interpretation and thoughts of the field, i.e. it makes no pretensions toward objectivity (could it?), and he seeks to trace the trajectory of thoughts and experiments leading up to the goal of presenting "mindware" as explaining the mind with nothing outside of the material world. In this vein, the only section of the book I considered worthwhile was the second appendix, "Consciousness and the Meta-Hard Problem," though the thoughts are at the forefront of philosophy today. Apart from that, Clark does a nice job breaking down some of Daniel Dennett's more opaque theories, especially from the latter's book [b:Consciousness Explained|2069|Consciousness Explained|Daniel C. Dennett|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1386924714s/2069.jpg|1860288]--a book that I still regard with trepidation (I've only managed the first few pages several different times).

Having read a lot in the area of philosophy of mind and in neuroscience, I looked to this book to bring some coherence to all the schools of thought and the history thereof. In the end, I find myself continuing to lean more and more away from philosophy. For the goal presented in the problem of mind-body dualism and in the explanation of qualia, I really don't see a fruitful explanation coming from the dialectical approach of philosophy or even the analytical approach of logic; I look more towards neuroscience. Which, actually, brings up another point regarding science and philosophy.

More and more I'm starting to view philosophy as nothing more than an analogy factory--at least, as regards metaphysics. I've been reading and enjoying philosophy for a while, including a subscription to Philosophy Now, but lately, as compared to science books and my other subscription to Scientific American, I am getting impatient with philosophy. Yet I cannot completely abandon it. I've read many times that philosophy's proper place is to help think the right way about a thing, to clarify thinking, which is a laudable goal since even scientific phenomena must be explained in language at some point. So, I agree that there must be some intellectual agency governing how to clearly think about and express a given thing in language.

In addition to language, there is of course the branch of philosophy that deals with ethics. And, as scientific discovery progresses (perhaps especially in the field of AI) I can see where it would be as equally prudent to steep ourselves in clear ethics as in clear thought and language. But--hey!--good luck finding that holy grail! What doesn't start unending debates is an equation.

Well, unless we're talking about quantum mechanics, of course. ( )