Towards a Science of Mind
It addresses the fundamental mystery of consciousness for philosophy and neuroscience, but is incremental as it builds on existing ideas without new breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the mind/body problem by proposing a rigorous science of mind, focusing on mapping neural activity to subjective experience, but provides no concrete results or numbers.
The ancient mind/body problem continues to be one of deepest mysteries of science and of the human spirit. Despite major advances in many fields, there is still no plausible link between subjective experience (qualia) and its realization in the body. This paper outlines some of the elements of a rigorous science of mind (SoM) - key ideas include scientific realism of mind, agnostic mysterianism, careful attention to language, and a focus on concrete (touchstone) questions and results. A core suggestion is to focus effort on the (still mysterious) mapping from neural activity to subjective experience.