Abstract

The article compares the history of solving the “mystery of life” and modern scientific and philosophical approaches to the “mystery of mind”. The main steps in solving the “mystery of life” are described. Such obstacles in the way of revealing the connections between the processes of mind and brain processes as “cognitive closeness”, “gap in explanation”, and “difficult problem” are considered. From the point of view of the philosophy of science, the advantages, and disadvantages of the main philosophical theories of mind are evaluated: the theory of the identity of mental and neural processes, functional theory, and the theory of property dualism.

Key words: life, mind, psycho-neural correlations, identity theory, functionalism, property dualism, the gap in the explanation of mind.