Sir, – Prof Sheila Greene (January 15th) raises a common objection to the idea that mental experience arises solely from the activity of the brain. That is that such a theory ignores the "complex interactions of the brain with the body, the material world and the socio-cultural world of relationships and meanings".
Of course it does no such thing – on the contrary, it absolutely embraces the complexity of embodied agents acting and interacting in a dynamic environment.
All that information is necessarily processed by the brain – how else could we know we are having a social interaction? Where else would our memories of past experiences be stored?
At any point, the current play of such interactions is represented in the current state of activity of the brain and interpreted in the context of the history of all such experiences, written in changes to brain circuits accumulated over a lifetime. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN MITCHELL,
Associate Professor of
Genetics and
Neuroscience,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.