Why You Are Not Your Brain

Great Scientific American article summarizing the contribution of George Lakoff to linguistic theory and the philosophy of mind. Most of what it says I've blogged about before while reading through Philosophy in the Flesh, so I won't repeat it here. But note the way the article ends (emphasis added):

What exactly will this paradigm look like? It’s unclear. But I was excited to hear from Lakoff that he is trying to “bring together neuroscience with the neural theory of language and thought,” through a new brain language and thought center at Berkeley. Hopefully his work there, along with the work of young professors like Davis, will allow us to understand the brain as part of a much greater dynamic system that isn’t confined to our cortices.

What modern science is teaching us is that the quest to understand our own minds has been unduly limited in scope. We can only understand our minds by understanding our evolution more broadly.