The mind is a concept, the brain is a physical thing. It is very conceivable that things without brains could have minds. 'Strong' Artificial Intelligence is a

The mind is a concept, the brain is a physical thing. It is very conceivable that things without brains could have minds. 'Strong' Artificial Intelligence is an example of this. Intelligent quasars would be another example. (Meat that thinks? Preposterous!) It is also very conceivable that things without minds, could have brains. Does a dog have a mind? aardvark? chipmunk? toad? ant? They all have brains that function in basically the same way as ours do. Saying that the mind doesn't really exist is also an acceptable answer, but kind of an odd one from the perspective of someone experiencing it. Point being: Neuroscience is primarily mechanical. It explains human brains and monkey brains and dog brains equally well. It explains hwo they work. We primarily study human brains because we have a vested interest in understanding them. (Also we consider our own brains to be the best). We end up studying the mind in neuroscience, because it is one of the interesting (and complicated) phenomena of the human brain (as compared to an ant brain).