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All the available science suggests that the nervous system is an indispensable contributor to the making of minds and consciousness. But the nervous system alone is not sufficient to explain minds and consciousness. Attempts to understand consciousness exclusively in terms of neural activity have failed and are, in good part, responsible for the belief held by some scientists and educated laypeople that consciousness is an inexplicable mystery. It is likely true that consciousness only emerges in organisms endowed with nervous systems, but it is just as true that consciousness also requires abundant interactions between those systems and many non-nervous parts of the organism
What the rest of the body brings to the marriage with the nervous system is billions of years of complex biological intelligence, the covert competence that sustains life by satisfying the demands of life regulation and maintaining homeostasis. What nervous systems bring to ...
