Abstract

Many questions concerning the nature of the mind have remained intractable since their first systematic discussion by the ancient Greeks. What is the nature of knowledge, and how is it possible to represent the world? What are consciousness and free will? What is the self and how is it that some organisms are more intelligent than others? Since it is now overwhelmingly evident that these are phenomena of the physical brain, it is not surprising that an established empirical and theoretical foundation in this domain has eluded us for so long. For in order to understand what we are and how we work, we must understand the brain and how it works. Yet the brain is exceedingly difficult to study, and research on any significant scale is critically dependent on advanced technology.