"Well researched and well written, this is an excellent introduction to the nascent field of nonlinear neurodynamics. Rockwell has some excellent passages on causality and supervenience, and he is to be congratulated for having extricated himself from the swamps of GOFAI, materialism, and functionalism."
-- Walter J. Freeman, University of California, Berkeley, author of How Brains Make Up Their Minds

In this highly original work, Teed Rockwell rejects both dualism and the mind-brain identity theory. He proposes instead that mental phenomena emerge not merely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world. The mind can be seen not as an organ within the body, but as a "behavioral field" that fluctuates within this brain-body-world nexus. If we reject the dominant form of the mind-brain identity theory-which Rockwell calls "Cartesian materialism" (distinct from Daniel Dennett's concept of the same name)-and accept this new alternative, then many philosophical and scientific problems can be solved. Other philosophers have flirted with these ideas, including Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam, Millikan, and Dennett. But Rockwell goes further than these tentative speculations and offers a detailed alternative to the dominant philosophical view, applying pragmatist insights to contemporary scientific and philosophical problems.