Mind and body
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
Am I my body, or do I have a body?
To treat the body as an instrument is to be able to stand back from it, repair it, leave it behind in thought; to identify with it is for nothing of me to remain when it suffers or wears out. Our relation to illness, to pleasure, to ageing and to our own animality is decided here.
Could a machine ever truly think?
If thinking is only a matter of organization, a machine could genuinely think, and we might owe it something. If running a program is not enough, our machines merely imitate, though an artifact of another kind might one day succeed. And if thought is inseparable from life, the most brilliant machine will remain a thing. To take a position is to say what makes a mind.
What is reality made of: matter, mind, or both?
What, at bottom, is the world made of? To say that everything is matter, that everything is mind, or that reality comprises two irreducible orders is to set the background for everything else: what God, life, and thought are, and what an understanding of the world can hope to achieve. The question is the oldest and most abstract in metaphysics, yet every worldview answers it, often without realizing it.
What makes me remain myself through time?
What makes me the same person as the child in the old photographs, or as the one I will be in thirty years? If nothing stable endures, promises, remorse, and pride in a past self lose their footing; if a core remains, no change ever truly remakes me. To take a position is to say what exactly we are holding onto when we say "me."
Is lived experience something more than the structure and functioning of the brain?
Pain, the red I see, the taste of coffee: cognitive science describes ever more finely the brain mechanisms that accompany them, but does lived experience reduce to them? To take a position is to say whether experience is nothing more than the brain's organization, whether it adds something irreducible to it, whether it rests on an inwardness already present in matter, or whether introspection deceives us about its very existence. The axis assumes a brain that is genuinely real: those for whom mind comes first and matter is an appearance take their position on the nature of reality.