Very interesting and cleverly written book about the mind-body question. I don't agree with some of McGinn's ideas but he certainly made me think. ( )

The fundamental argument of this book is that there is (or may be) a fundamental inability on the part of human beings how the brain (which is extended in space and time) gives rise to consciousness (which is not so extended). This fundamental inability he calls "cognitive closure."

This is an interesting idea, but there are a couple of problems with the way McGinn handles it. First of all, people have come up with this idea before; he's not really adding anything new, as far as I can tell. Schopenhauer already said the same thing: that consciousness is that which represents the world as it is extended in space and time, and therefore it itself cannot be known in terms of space and time (that which knows everything and is known by none, I believe he put it somewhere in the World as Will and Representation). Secondly, McGinn makes his own argument far less interesting than it could be by merely saying that the brain-mind problem may be insoluble, but may not be--the only argument for its insolubility is that we've not yet solved it. He likens it to other problems we may never be able to solve, like whether aliens exist (if I recall correctly). The problem with this is that he's denying the fundamental difference between the brain-mind problem, on the one hand, and all problems in space and time, on the other. The latter are all, in theory, soluble by us humans. The former not only may not be solved, it cannot be solved, because it is by the existence of a consciousness that time and space exist at all, and therefore we cannot know consciousness in terms of that which it enables to exist, i.e. time and space. ( )