Introduction

TL;DRAbstract

Mind has always been a mystery and it is fair to say that it is still one. Religions settle this irritating question by assuming that mind is non-material: it is just linked during the duration of a life to the body, a link that death breaks. It must be realized that this metaphysical attitude pervaded even the theorization of natural phenomena: to ‘explain’ why a stone falls and a balloon filled with hot air tends to rise, Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, assumed that stones house a principle (a sort of a mind) which makes them fall and that balloons embed the opposite principle which makes them rise. Similarly Kepler, at the turn of the seventeeth century, thought that the planets were maintained on their elliptical tracks by some immaterial spirits. To cite a last example, chemists were convinced for quite a while that organic molecules could never be synthetized, since their synthesis required the action of a vital principle. Archimedes, about a century after Aristotle, Newton,

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