O problema mente-corpo:

o complexo fenômeno da mente consciente

Abstract

Throughout the pages of this paper, we will seek to present some of the conceptual delimitations to which we have appealed to refine our understanding of key-terms in philosophy of mind, such as mind, conscious mind (consciousness), self and behavior. We will also try to present some of the implications of these conceptual delimitations for the embodied and emergentist approach that supports our position on the problem of mind-body relations. We believe that the group of conceptual boundaries around which the article revolves may foster our expectation of offering an alternative answer to the ‘materialism reductionism’ versus ‘dualism’, substance or property dichotomy. In this paper, we propose to present the three essential steps of our investigation, namely: (i) a discussion about the basic status of consciousness, or, in other words, its space in nature; (ii) an investigation of the reasons in favor of the role of the body in the structure of the conscious mind; and, finally, (iii) a defense of the thesis that the (conscious) mind emerges from the integration and interaction between the proper-body, the brain and the environment. At the end, we aim to support the thesis that the place of consciousness in nature should stand as the culmination of a nervous operation which finds its origin in overlapping and re-entrant processes, all of them the result of the relationship of the interaction and the integration between body, brain and environment.