I'm fairly certain that the mind is simply a physical part of our bodies. This part of our bodies is located in a large grey organ called the brain. There is for a start no evidence for any kind of supernatural "spirit" or "soul", this is quite simply the God of the Gaps fallacy in a different guise. Secondly there is no need for us to assume that any such a "soul" needs to exist anyway since there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that all thought processes and consciousness can be explained by the firings of millions of neurones.

A friend of mine (who I'm never quite sure what his stance is) asked me how I could explain all thought and consciousness in terms of the firings of neurones. I'll point out that I am a philosopher, not a neuroscientist. I referred to a computer, or an electrical musical instrument. In the first case I have no idea how a computer manages to display a picture on a screen, it is simply just electrical current passing through a complex maze of wires. How does a computer know to display the letter 's' on the screen when I press the corresponding key? The point is, I can't explain this, but we all know computers are purely physical machines. Now the brain is a much more complex computer; while a computer might have three or four possible connections to any one part, the brain has thousands. With electronic musical instruments sounds is transferred through a jack lead to an amplifier which then produces the sound to the desired pitch and tone. In this case there is no complex machinery, the jack lead carrying the signal is just a single wire, and speakers (a friend of mine in the music tech industry has taken them apart) are simply vibrating peices of paper in a cone. So how does it manage to produce a crystal clear sound? How can it amplify a voice to sound as a voice should? I don't know, but I know that it is a purely physical phenomenon.

Though I agree, on principle with making the analogy of a computer's operation to model brain function, after some thought I've come around to consider it a bit misleading. Unlike a computer which from it's very basic evolution requires modification strictly by addition of software and network adaptation in order to compile information, a human brain is modified in it's lifetime more generally by reduction. That is, we adapt from birth to focus and filter (most generally) stimulus rather than to access it, this is a major difference between computers and brains.

That's not to say that the human brain doesn't add compilers to its function throughout life, of course we do, however, it is also true that we do so to the neglect and ultimately to the obliteration of a large part of our data handling capacity. Computers don't do this, the evolution of computers is invariably the furthering and expansion of computational function, to consider a human brain in its evolution over a lifetime behaving this way would be basically deceptive, what a functioning grown human brain processes is a mere blip on the scale of what it ignores.

I am inclined to think this is an important point in the question of the mind body relationship. Philosophically I lean monist which means I have no problem at all with the proposition that brains are purely physical, however, I do contest the limits that some would place on what 'purely physical' can mean, there is a lot more purely physical information that is potentially perceptible by the human psyche (tongue twister not intended there) and it is not even controversial to point out that we tend to rely heavily on a really narrow stock of compilers when using those brains.

It's not hard to put two and two together to conceive of the inevitable event of literally changing our minds before too long time passes.   But moreover, it would suggest that a clear reckoning of the mind body relationship will continue to elude us simply because the relationship is not fixed, it's actually very mutable.