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Brain, Mind, and the Nature of Being
Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University, July 2009

The name Oxford University almost automatically conjures up images of august buildings towering over windy side lanes, students on their bicycles whizzing around, visitors strolling down the streets, sages rambling down the side-walks… images of which I was pleasantly surprised to find were entirely valid in reality as I stepped off the coach with Dr. Sweeney, the Academic Dean of IPS, and another fellow IPS student.

Held at Blackfriars Hall of Oxford University under the auspices of the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, this year’s summer programme in Oxford was focused on the interface between the philosophy of mind and neuroscience—their point of convergence as well as their areas of divergence.

To put it simply, it was a symposium on what constitutes a human person—body and soul, brain and mind.

What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be a human person? What does it mean, ultimately, to be an embodied person living in a society with the technologies currently available both to improve the human body as well as the human soul?

Surely this all-encompassing theme of human nature is of utmost importance to the mission of the IPS; and it was a wonderful privilege to be in the presence of the leading academics as well as practitioners in the field who were all grappling with and attempting to make sense of the whole business of being human, so to speak.

It is often said—so often, indeed, that it has become cliché—that a picture is worth a thousand words. I should like to say here, then, of my experience at Oxford that it was and is definitely worth more than a thousand words, or a thousand pictures for that matter.