The interest in the current mind–body problem across a great portion of contemporary philosophy needs no justification. It is raised by the discoveries made concerning the brain’s anatomy and physiology and their relevance on the brain’s functioning in mental acts. Not to simplify excessively, neuroscience is supposed to find the fundamental explanation of the mind in relation to cerebral organisation and even with regard to human acts. Neuroscience promotes a theory of causality whose main objective is to displace explanatory prototypes that cannot take into account those mental acts that respond to the demands of the current scientific conceptions of the world as an element of material things.

This void with regard to the explanation of the mind—which is supposed to be filled when thorough brain topography may be reached—has been a parallel concept to that which considers the soul as an obsolete concept. Renowned scientists such as Francis Crick maintain that the discovery of the DNA helix means that we can manage without a supernatural reality, such as the soul, as stated in a famous article [1]. “To understand ourselves, we need to know how nervous cells behave and interact. We are nothing but a package of neurons” ([2], p. 3). According to Crick, the soul would connect us with a religious realm that is not at all connected to our scientific view of the world. In fact, the term ‘soul’ has been replaced by ‘consciousness’, which has also been considered as an equivalent of the mind, as a product of neural activity. Many problems arise from this position from a philosophical point of view. For philosophy, at least, this has already been revealed well below cognitive neuroscience’s questionings. One of the major difficulties is based on the existence of liberty. If every human act is featured as one of free will, there would then exist an impassable incompatibility between the liberty of such acts and their cause, which according to neuroscience’s testimony is the product of complex electrochemical combinations.

In Michael Gazzaniga’s works, there is room for a new discipline, neuroethics, which goes far beyond its original meaning [3]. The neuroethics concept was first introduced by W. Safire on 10 July 2003 in the New York Times. Safire coined it in referring to the reflection about the licit and illicit in investigations of the human brain, though Gazzaniga extends it to considerations of normality, sickness, mortality, way of life, and philosophy of life with regard to our knowledge about cerebral mechanisms, especially since all our acts invariably remit to a neurochemical base. There is an evident difficulty when it comes to reconciling this physicalism with the certainty that we are free that we feel at the time of decision. Jaegwon Kim tries to harmonise both sides while affirming that the intentional mental cognitive activity linked to behaviour is reducible to a neural factor, whereas qualia [4] is not. In this way, according to Kim, physicalism would be ‘manqué, but not by much’, mistaken but not by much.

Certain argumentative acrobatics cannot be denied in some of the works that try to explain free will directed to the cutback on mental acts on its neural conditions. Conclusions from Gazzaniga or Kim go like this: brains are automatic, but will is free. This reductionism leads to the mind being placed out in the physical world; it has been addressed as a friendly philosophy for neuroscience, which denies neither freedom nor the mind’s physical character. This might seem like squaring the circle, but in fact that is what the effort of philosophers of the mind is about. John Searle has exhaustively taken care of this matter. The topic of the mind is approached in Minds, Brain and Science [5], and the subject of free will, in Liberté et neurobiology [6].

According to Searle, the mind consists of a sequence of thoughts, sensations, and conscious and unconscious experiences which sum up our mental life. It is necessary to get rid of the ghost of old philosophical theories which occupy our concept of what is mental. Our main concern consists of a personal representation of common sense as free and thoughtful beings, which does not match with the one in which science tells us that the world is made up of physical particles neither with mind nor with meaning. Above all, the solution might be somewhat easier than we think, since we are determined to find an exit provided by an obsolete philosophy and an outdated vocabulary such as the one used during the seventeenth century. Of course, it is Descartes who Searle is talking about. To Descartes, the issue was how we could deal with the link between two different realities or such different genres. Physical science’s success has brought up the relocation of the essence of mind, especially the fact of subjective mental states and that these are as real and irreducible as any other part of the universe.

Four different aspects of mental states are identified by Searle, which seem impossible to articulate from our scientific idea of the world as something made up by material things.

The second feature is what philosophers call “intentionality”. Through it, our mental states relate to objects and refer to things which are different from mental states. The area of intentionality is quite vast. It condenses belief, wish, hope, fear, love, hatred, lust, loathing, shame, pride, irritability, fun and all those mental states, whether conscious or not, related to a world beyond the mind itself.

The third feature of the mind seems hard to harmonise with the subjectivity of mental states. This undeniable subjectivity is marked by evident facts: No one can feel another’s pain. That said, how is it possible to deal with the subjectivity of mental states and the scientific view of reality as something objective?

Finally, there is a fourth issue about mental causation. We all believe that our thoughts have a causal impact on the physical world. If someone decides to raise their arm, the arm is raised, reminds Searle. If our thoughts have a non-physical nature, how is it possible that they have a physical effect? How come a mental issue has a physical influence? With a slight irony, Searle states: “Are we supposed to think that thoughts may wind up the axons and shake dendrites or even strain through the cellular membrane and attack the cell’s nucleus?”

A philosophy of the mind which is concerned with seeking harmony between body and mind cannot neglect these four issues. The good news is that the solution to this matter is simpler than one might think, says Searle. Actually, our only difficulty is we keep subscribing to insufficient philosophical theories. Therefore, Searle’s proposals to solve the mind–body conflict are the following:

Mental phenomena, each and every one of them, whether conscious or not, related to sight, hearing, pain, tickles, itchiness, thoughts, all our mental life are, indeed, caused by processes occurring in the brain.

The explanation of this issue consists of a detailed description of the physiology of pain, taking an example on mental phenomena. This physiology condenses those processes occurring in the brain. This complements Searle’s previous thesis:

Pain and other mental phenomena are just features of the brain (and perhaps also from the rest of the central nervous system) ([7], pp. 15–21).

At this point, Searle addresses the cause of mental acts from another perspective. He tries deconstructing quite a rooted idea, namely, the one of material physical events being the cause of immaterial events. This is, in fact, a mistake, he says. To overcome this apparent difficulty, Searle proposes a more adequate concept of causation while observing other kinds of causal relations in nature. A common distinction in physics is the one about micro- and macro-properties in small- and large-scale systems. For example, if we take a glass of water, we must deal with the water’s micro-particles which are constituted by atoms and molecules. These features explain the liquidity of water. The nature of the interaction between water molecules has a microscopic expression, just as the interaction of solid molecules explains the features of that solid state at the touch of a hand. It could be said, then, that the superficial feature is caused by the conduct of the microelement, and at the same time it is formed by a microelement system. There is a cause-and-effect relationship, but at the same time these superficial traits are only features a level above the system itself whose micro-level behaviour causes such features. In the case of any objection against it, Searle argues that scientific progress precisely consists of the fact of an expression originally defining itself in terms of superficial traits which are accessible to the senses, and being subsequently definable in terms of a microstructure which causes these superficial traits. This provides a fine explanatory model for the risky business between the mind and the brain. It could be said, then, that mental phenomena are caused by processes which take place at a neural level in the brain and, at the same time, they are presented in the system itself constituted by neurons, which seem a first-level equivalent to other physical phenomena such as micro-particles. In this respect, Searle cannot escape from reductionism’s objection: why would anyone assume mental acts are not being reduced to physical conditions? As Thomas Nagel points out: “Reduction is the analysis of something identified at a level of description, in terms of another and more fundamental level of description which leads us to think that the first one is nothing more than the second one: water can be described as H₂O molecules, heat as molecular movement, or light as electromagnetic radiation” ([8], p. 128).