"How could solid-seeming brains support such ghostly things as thoughts?" Mind-body problem is presented here as being fundamental, and mysterious.
However, other problems once seemed intractable, but are no longer so. For example, science has explained away the mystery of "what is life", without appealing to magic principles of animism.
(NB: Or has it? I'm reminded of the point made in Crichton's (1969, p. 201) novel The Andromeda Strain, where a group of scientists decide that energy conversion is the hallmark of life. Leavitt, a central character in the novel, wants to argue against this point. He brings in a swatch of black cloth, a watch, and a piece of granite. `Gentlemen, I give you three living things.' He then proceeds to show how their notion of "life" doesn't rule out this claim. As a result, his peers had to change their view. Is the notion of Life more mysterious than Minsky would have us believe?)
Minsky argues that Thought was extremely mysterious a century ago, but the history of ideas that have culiminated in the modern field of artificial intelligence "inspired a flood of new ideas about how machines could do what only minds had done previously." Still, the mystery has not been completely removed, because we are at a point where better theories are required. "This book will show how the tiny machines that we'll call `agents of the mind' could be the long sought `particles' that those theories need."
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