More Than A Brain

Sally Satel writing at the Atlantic urges the distinction between brain, as studied by neuroscience, and mind. She strongly suggests that mind is irreducible to brain, but seems unwilling to go all the way and say that brain is instrumental to mind, which is higher. She does however note the ominous implications of a totalizing neuroscience for any jurisprudence which might succumb to it, a point also made long ago by CS Lewis in his observations on certain notions- which nowadays might be called biopolitical- regarding rehabilitation. But simply asserting enough independence for mind as to allow for genuine moral agency still falls short, if we confine mind to the realm of subjectivity in the modern sense; moral agency is meaningless in the end unless we can say that mind comprehends reality, a reality much wider than the narrow scientistic picture allows, and that finally, our minds, and the world they know, are both measured by the Mind of God.