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In class, I voted in favor of Dickinson’s view on the story about brain and behavior, but after thinking about it, I am now “on the fence”. I have been taught in the past that the brain was made up of an enormous number of individual cells, called neurons, and that chains of neurons led out of the brain and into the rest of the body, ultimately ending up in my muscles and thereby causing the body to move about and exhibit behavior. But that knowledge doesn’t remove the mystery of how my will – my thoughts – can result in physical actions. And there is a converse side to this problem: why should physical events – for example, light striking my eyes – result in thoughts, feelings, and perceptions? After all, most physical events – like, say, knocking something over – don’t result in any such thing. A binder knocked off of a desk (presumably) doesn’t have any awareness of hitting the floor. So why doesn’t light simply enter the eyes, travel to the brain, go through all kinds of complex processing, and emerge as behavior, without there being any experience, awareness, or consciousness accompanying these events? Why is there awareness, consciousness, experience, subjectivity in the world, rather than merely behavior? Subjectivity seems oddly gratuitous. It certainly seems that, if physics is a complete description of reality, as scientists believe, behavior alone would be the expected result of physical causes. Yet behavior alone does not fully describe us. There is an inwardness to our existence, which is consciousness. The question as to how consciousness arises from the activity of the brain is one part of our question. The other part is whether consciousness can really cause things to happen – and this question is really identical to the question as to whether we have what is commonly called "free will" – and, if it does, how does it contrive to produce effects in physical things like neurons? Taken together, these two questions constitute the mind-body problem. Consciousness seems like literal magic in a world that science describes as devoid of magic. How are we to account for it in a way that is consistent with what we know about the world?