Horgan thinks that few apart from professional philosophers are familiar with the phrase “mind–body problem”, but it has been a life-long obsession for him, as it has for me. It’s interesting that we are both former Catholics; at least in my case awareness of the problem goes back to my late ‘teens or early twenties, when I was starting to question the faith in which I had been brought up. Since then I’ve read practically everything I’ve come across on the subject and its various allotropes (consciousness, free will, the soul…), although, as Horgan says, much of it is “dauntingly arcane”. Continue reading