Discussion

The mind-brain problem, despite its long history, remains one of the most complex, urgent, and unsolved problems in philosophy and science. It has engaged the best minds throughout history; but it is a problem to which not even Freud found a solution. Since his time, and in spite of major empirical advances in neurobiology and the best efforts of some of the finest minds of the twentieth century, very little progress toward its solution has been made. Anyone who tackles the task of unraveling the relationship between mind and brain does so at his peril, forewarned by others' past failures, directed by certain guidelines, and with the knowledge that his efforts will be rewarded by the appreciation of those with less courage.

Various model solutions to the problem have been proposed, for example, isomorphism and psychophysical parallelism. A less popular but recurrent solution is the identity theory of which Gardner's paper is a representative example. And as such his paper exemplifies some of the difficulties with which the identity model is fraught.

At one period of his thought, Carnap, for example, held that the language of all sciences could be reduced to a unitary basis. However, he later abandoned this belief. The problem of the translation of the mental into the physical is not solved by the substitution of "mental" concepts by neurophysiological, anatomical,