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I guess that my position on the nature of the brain/mind paradigm can be best explained as similar to the position that I hold on the existence of ghosts and psychic phenomenon. I am a person, who you might have guessed, is intrigued by the paranormal and supernatural elements of life and who finds that the existence of an "other" experience of reality, time, etc. somehow necessary for my existence i.e. I want to believe/believe in this phenomenon. However, I am also the first person in a group to tear apart a so called encounter of the paranormal, hack it up into logical parts of possible elements that could explain such phenomenon as occurrences very much grounded in the generally perceived vision of reality i.e. natural magnetic fields, and dust motes caught in the light are just as at the cause of a so called ghostly encounter as any actual entity of the paranormal. In the same venue, I find the mechanical, neurological explanations that seem to explain things such as ghostly encounters, past life experiences, out-of body experiences just as intriguing and necessary as the phenomena themselves. Yet, the "genuine" paranormal can still exist for just as viably in my understanding of existence as the studies that demonstrate intentionally induced experiences of the kind through the manipulation of brain chemistry and physical stimulus of certain brain regions related to specific senses, etc. There is something intriguing and acceptable in the notion that we are no more and no less than ingenious vehicles of nature, organic machines, that life is without any profound agency on a cosmic scale. There is a type of comfort that can come from a void, with a lack of agency or meaning, there is in turn a certain lack of responsibility, a kind of freedom in a nothingness. Yet, the void that undermines our agency and divests us of purpose is disturbing as well, if only in that we find it disturbing and experience a deep seeded need to perceive a mind or a soul. Even when we can agree that our behaviors and all the complex variables that differentiate us are the sum of all the little electrical charges in all of us, we still cannot disregard the result of that sum and thresh it of its impact on our lives, i.e. even if we can explain love chemically, can break it down into a biological process, when comes to our own experience we cannot negate its existence or its effect on us and what it means. Perhaps this cognitive dissonance between the logic that we can digest and accept, and which tells us we are an organic machine, yet still somehow ignore is another emergent property of our existence, that we must believe in the authenticity of ourselves (as a soul as a mind) on some level, despite observations that bring us to other validations of reality, seems to be a very unique coping method, else existence would be to hard to maintain. Yet, why even develop in such a way that demands a mechanism to maintain our drive to live. We can understand death in a logical sense, but its experience, what it is, escapes us. We can know that all things "end" yet our own ends are inconceivable. We can understand on a logical level that we are just biological matter, yet how to just be biological matter is impossible and even repulsive for many of us. For, we must live, and thus must cope with life even against our own understanding of it, and yet other organisms are alive with seemingly less need for such a mechanism.