There are philosophers who devote their entire careers to understanding the relation between the brain, that lump of gray matter inside our craniums, and the mind, with all its emotional, sensual and cognitive splendors. It's not hard to see why. Not only is the relation a puzzle of profound interest in itself, but advances in biology and neuroscience have made it an urgent topic at the moment. Think of the aspirations of neuroeconomists to predict our consumer preferences to the nth degree, or the claims of brain scientists that our political beliefs are simply a matter of primitive chemical responses lodged in our reptilian cortex.
One approach to the brain-mind puzzle, advanced over the years with subtlety and depth by Patricia Churchland and her husband, Paul, both professors of philosophy, is that what we think of as our minds are but crude theories for explaining what's going on in the chemical workings of our brains. By such lights, our mental state of pain, for instance, is a “folk psychological” concept that we use to refer to an array of neuronal processes that are even now not fully understood; in reality there is no “pain center” in the brain. Unlike some of their fellow philosophers, who think that our brains are so constituted that we will never understand how they give rise to the mind, the Churchlands see the mind as merely a crude way of understanding the brain.
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