The Paradox Engine: New Problems for the Mind-Body Divide

This work introduces a systematic collection of paradoxes that challenge prevailing assumptions about the relationship between mind and body. Rather than rehearsing familiar formulations of the hard problem of consciousness, it constructs a “paradox engine”: a set of novel conceptual puzzles that expose fractures in reductionist, physicalist, and dualist accounts alike. Drawing on metaphysical analysis, epistemic limits, and logical inversions, the paradoxes presented here generate pressure against any simple alignment of mental and physical domains. They reveal how consciousness resists assimilation to material processes, how epistemic access to subjective states destabilizes objectivist frameworks, and how efforts at integration often collapse into circularity or infinite regress. These problems are not merely rhetorical; they seek to expand the conceptual space for new theories of mind by showing why standard approaches remain inadequate. By cataloguing these paradoxes, the book aims to provide both a critical map of the mind-body impasse and a stimulus for rethinking consciousness, embodiment, and reality itself.