Philosophy of mind studies human minds – and these are puzzling. One mystery concerns how subjective experience, or consciousness, is even possible. It cannot be seen or measured, nor can we prove to ourselves that others have it at all, yet it is bedrock for human self-understanding and communication. Another mystery is how the mind relates to the body – they seem to operate by different laws entirely, yet can influence each other. Beyond this is the question (overlapping with epistemology) of how our minds gain knowledge of our world; a naive picture says that we passively receive sensory information, but a different view says that we actively co-create our perceptions with the help of our bodies and contexts. Another mystery concerns our ability (errors notwithstanding) to mindread other people – do we do this theoretically, by simulating their internal world for ourselves, or in more automatic and less conscious ways? The subdiscipline of cognitive science aims to inform these questions with contemporary models of how the brain processes information. 

Religion has long been thought to yield clues about the mysteries of the human mind, leading to fertile intersections between the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of mind. Minds appear to have more in common with God and other spirits than they do with physical bodies. And one way to think about how bodies can have minds is by appeal to the divine in each of us. But if the mind (or perhaps the soul) is eternal, questions arise about how it relates to the mortal body, what happens to both after death, and how the two influence each other in life. Additional questions at the intersection of mind and religion concern embodied religious cognition – if our embodied experiences and actions do co-create our perceptions alongside input from the world, then this has potentially large implications for how a person might come to perceive God (if he exists) through embodied practices such as rituals or prayer. It also (overlapping with feminist and critical philosophy) has implications for the way in which differently embodied people – along dimensions of ability, gender, and so forth – experience religion.