The Mind Incarnate  
Lawrence A. Shapiro
A Bradford Book
How are the mind and body harnessed together? In The Mind Incarnate,                  Lawrence Shapiro addresses this question by testing two widely accepted hypotheses,                  the multiple realizability thesis and the separability thesis. He argues that there                  is signficicant -- though far from decisive -- evidence against them.While                  contemporary philosophers no longer view the mind as a supernatural entity -- the                  famous "Ghost in the Machine" dogma that Gilbert Ryle ridiculed over fifty years ago                  -- Shapiro argues that naturalistic approaches to understanding the mind retain                  their own naturalized varieties of ghosts. In particular, the multiple realizability                  thesis holds that the connection between human minds and human brains is in some                  sense accidental: the tie between mental properties and neural properties is not                  physically necessary. According to the separability thesis, the mind is a largely                  autonomous component residing in the body that contributes little to its                  functioning. Shapiro tests these hypotheses against two rivals, the mental                  constraint thesis and the embodied mind thesis. Collecting evidence from a variety                  of sources (e.g., neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and embodied cognition) he                  concludes that the multiple realizability thesis, accepted by most philosophers as a                  virtual truism, is much less obvious than commonly assumed, and that there is even                  stronger reason to give up the separability thesis. In contrast to views of mind                  that tempt us to see the mind as simply being resident in a brain or body, Shapiro                  view is a far more encompassing integration of mind, brain, and body than                  philosophers have supposed.