Problem The contemporary situation of Philosophy of Mind begins with a paradox: empirical knowledge of the brain, behaviour, perception, memory, sleep, anaesthesia and language processing has grown unprecedentedly, yet the question “What is mind?” has not disappeared. More data often do not answer the old questions; instead, they divide those questions into finer ones. “Mind” is not a uniform subject like a single object. Experience, thought, intention, emotion, memory, imagination, judgement, agency, self-awareness, bodily feeling and social understanding are distinct aspects of mental life; it would be unwarranted to assume in advance that one theory will explain them all in the same way. The first source of the new questions is neuroscience. Correlations between neural activity and mental states are increasing, but correlation, mechanism, constitution, cause and explanation are not the same thing. The ability to display a brain scan does not by itself determine the philosophical meaning of experience. The second is the reconsideration, within cognitive science, of a “brain-bound” model. The coupling of perception and action, bodily posture, sensorimotor skill, environment, artefacts, notebooks, smartphones, social interaction and language scaffolding suggests that the boundary of cognition cannot automatically be identified with the boundary of the skull. The third is the problem of first-person experience. A neural signature of pain may be measured, but the meaning of undergoing pain, self-reports of its intensity, its cultural expression, clinical trust and moral urgency are difficult to reduce to third-person measurement alone. The fourth is the new understanding of the self. Research on body ownership, agency, autobiographical memory, narrative identity, the minimal self, the social self and legal personhood shows that the “I” is not a simple, indivisible datum. Nor does calling the self an illusion settle every practical and ethical question. The fifth is the reassessment of affect and emotion. The rigid opposition between rational cognition and emotion has weakened; affect is increasingly recognised as playing a broad role in attention, salience, value, bodily regulation, decision and social relations. The sixth concerns animal minds. Lack of language is not evidence of lack of consciousness, but anthropomorphic projection is not evidence either. A combined test involving behaviour, nervous systems, learning, flexibility, pain-response and ecological context is required. The seventh concerns clinical boundary cases—coma, vegetative or unresponsive wakefulness states, minimally conscious states, anaesthesia, dementia, locked-in syndrome, neglect, blindsight, depersonalisation and others. Here philosophical concepts become directly connected with diagnostic, ethical and legal decisions. The eighth concerns artificial systems. A language model, robot or adaptive agent is not proved conscious merely because it produces human-like output; yet the claim that only biological entities can be conscious cannot simply be assumed without argument either. The necessary questions concern which kinds of architecture, integration, recurrent processing, embodiment, self-model, memory or affective regulation might be relevant. The ninth concerns neurotechnology. Brain–computer interfaces, neural decoding, stimulation, wearable sensing and personalised prediction raise new questions about mental privacy, agency, consent and cognitive liberty. At this point Philosophy of Mind is no longer merely abstract metaphysics. The tenth concerns social power. Diagnostic categories, intelligence measures, the attention economy, school discipline, psychiatric norms, disability classification and algorithmic inference create society’s operational assumptions about “mind.” A descriptive model is not separable from its institutional effects. In the context of Indian philosophy the challenge is twofold. It is wrong to treat terms such as ātman, anātman, citta, manas, buddhi, smṛti, anubhūti, pramāṇa and sākṣin as literal equivalents of the modern word “mind”; but it would also impoverish inquiry to exclude the independent conceptual resources of these traditions from contemporary dialogue. The aim of this chapter is not to declare one theory victorious, but to construct a method of questioning for a new Philosophy of Mind: distinguish levels, identify kinds of evidence, treat first-person and third-person data as complementary rather than opposed, take embodiment and sociality seriously, and make uncertainty explicit wherever evidence remains incomplete. Core Proposition The core proposition of this chapter is that a new philosophy of mind must move beyond the question “What single substance is it?” and develop a multilevel explanatory framework in which phenomenal, functional, neural, bodily, environmental, social and normative claims are tested by different criteria. For the explanation of any mental phenomenon, at least four questions should be kept distinct: What is it like as experience? What function does it perform? On what mechanism or structure does it depend? What role does it play in the relation between the person and the environment? An answer to one question is not automatically an answer to another. Neural dependence provides strong evidence that human mental life is deeply connected with brain function. But dependence does not by itself establish metaphysical identity. “When X changes, Y changes” is important, but the claim “X = Y” requires additional argument. First-person reports are not infallible, but neither are they fit to be discarded. In matters such as pain, mood, imagery, dreams, inner speech and conscious effort, reports themselves constitute one category of data; their reliability should be tested according to task, training, memory, language and incentive. Behavioural evidence is necessary, but behaviour alone should not be regarded as sufficient. The same behaviour may arise from different mechanisms; conversely, the same internal state may produce different behaviour because of differences in ability, disability, culture or motor constraint. A minimal claim about embodiment is almost unavoidable: human cognition is connected with the sensory, motor, visceral and regulatory processes of a living body. Stronger enactivist or constitutive claims must be tested separately; “the body matters” does not automatically entail that brain representation is unnecessary. Environmental scaffolding can be a genuine part of cognition, but not every tool is therefore “part of the mind.” Criteria such as reliability, automatic availability, reciprocal coupling, trust, integration and counterfactual dependence should be examined. It is useful to analyse the self not as a single metaphysical package but in components: bodily self, perspectival self, agency, ownership, autobiographical continuity, social recognition and narrative identity. Clinical evidence of dissociation among these components makes such distinctions philosophically significant. Affect is not the enemy of cognition; in many situations it provides the basis of value-sensitive orientation. Fear, disgust, attachment, fatigue, pain, curiosity and confidence alter the selection of information. Yet affective salience is not a guarantee of truth. Predictive processing may be a useful unifying research programme, but its explanatory scope should be limited by the evidence. Saying “the brain predicts” is meaningful only when prediction, error, updating, model and action stand in a measurable relation. For a science of consciousness, reportability, wakefulness, access, integration, recurrent processing, metacognition and behavioural flexibility are distinct indicators. They should not be combined into a single scalar score without justification. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ Assessment of animal and artificial consciousness should not be restricted to the question “Does it speak like a human?” A multi- criterion method involving architecture, learning, integration, embodiment, valence, self-maintenance, temporal continuity, global availability and behavioural evidence is more responsible. The question of mental causation is connected with practical agency. If reason, intention and decision play an irreducible role in explanatory vocabulary, a causal account must make clear the validity of agent-level explanation; simply adding more neural description does not eliminate reason-explanation. Philosophy of Mind should not be made an island apart from neuroethics. Mental privacy, cognitive enhancement, manipulation, responsibility, disability, psychiatric classification and the attribution of mentality to AI all show the ethical effects of our concepts. Dialogue between Indian and modern theories should not become a contest over “who said it first.” The parallel method should identify axes of inquiry—self-continuity, the object of cognition, error, memory, awareness, embodiment, liberation or therapy, agency—and claims of historical influence should be made only where evidence supports them. Final formula: “There is no single map of the mind; there are many levels of evidence. Do not mix the levels—distinguish them, and then examine where they constrain one another.” Principal Arguments The first argument concerns explanatory dissociation. A patient may be unable to report a stimulus yet show above-chance performance in a forced-choice task; such a case reveals the limits of conflating “perception,” “awareness,” “access” and “behavioural discrimination” under one term. The second argument comes from anaesthesia and sleep. Wakefulness, responsiveness and experience are not one axis; the possibilities of dreaming, responsiveness under sedation and covert awareness compel a more refined operational definition of consciousness. The third argument comes from pain. Nociceptive processing, pain behaviour, verbal report and the phenomenal character of suffering are related but not identical. For this reason the epistemic status of the patient’s report has special importance in clinical ethics. The fourth argument comes from body ownership. Experimental illusions such as the rubber-hand illusion, and neurological disturbances, show that the experience “this body is mine” may depend on constructed integration. Yet “constructed” does not mean “unreal”; controlled construction may be a biological function. The fifth argument comes from agency. The processes of initiating, monitoring and attributing action can dissociate. Thus the experience “I did this” is not wholly transparent self-knowledge; yet the concept of responsibility is not based on that experience alone. The sixth argument comes from memory. Autobiographical continuity is reconstructed; memory is not a recording device. But fallibility does not make reference to the past impossible. Corroboration, context, source-monitoring and external records can increase the reliability of memory. The seventh argument comes from attention. Attended information enjoys a processing advantage and is deeply connected with consciousness, but the identification attention = consciousness remains controversial. Experimental dissociations keep this distinction open. The eighth argument comes from working memory and global availability. When information becomes flexibly available to multiple systems, report, planning and control increase; global-workspace theories model this pattern. Yet success in identifying a neural signature is not the final solution to the phenomenal explanation of consciousness. The ninth argument comes from recurrent processing. The difference between feedforward discrimination and recurrent cortical interaction is important in theories of consciousness, but it would be premature to treat an empirical marker as a metaphysical essence. Competing theories can interpret the same datasets differently. The tenth argument comes from predictive processing. Perception may not be a passive copy but a dynamic negotiation between expectation and sensory evidence. Yet predictive language is scientifically useful only when the model is testable; calling every neural response a “prediction error” after the fact risks unfalsifiability. The eleventh argument comes from embodiment. Reach, balance, gaze, proprioception, breathing, heartbeat, gesture and motor skill alter perceptual and cognitive performance. Here the body may be not merely an information channel but an active component of task structure. The twelfth argument comes from enaction. An organism generates meaning in recurrent sensorimotor loops with its environment. On this view perception is not merely an “inner picture” but a form of action-readiness and world-directed skill. Whether representation is thereby rendered wholly unnecessary is a separate dispute. The thirteenth argument comes from extended cognition. A notebook or smartphone may play a memory-like role when information is consistently available, trusted, automatically consulted and integrated into the agent’s routine. An occasional Google search normally does not satisfy these criteria. The fourteenth argument comes from social cognition. Language, joint attention, teaching, imitation, norms, testimony and institutional practice alter the structure of human cognitive development. A model of “individual brain first, society later” may underestimate this developmental dependence. The fifteenth argument comes from affective regulation. Cognition is not separable from energy, arousal, bodily need and a landscape of value. Hunger, fatigue, fear or social rejection alter attention and decision; therefore a model of cold computation captures only part of the human mind. The sixteenth argument comes from self-models. An integrated model of perspective-taking, ownership and agency in the brain– body system may help explain the “mine-ness” of experience. But a model theory does not automatically entail an ethical conclusion such as “no person exists.” The seventeenth argument comes from language models and AI. Output resembling linguistic competence can be one indicator of mental properties, but consciousness, understanding, stable goals, affective valence and an autobiographical self require independent evidence. The distinction between simulation and possession should be maintained. The eighteenth argument comes from epistemic humility. Claims of certainty about markers of consciousness, the structure of the self, animal experience or machine sentience may be premature. The strength of a new Philosophy of Mind lies not in concealing what is unknown but in structuring uncertainty. Pūrvapakṣa Pūrvapakṣa 1: Neuroscience is advancing rapidly enough that the separate role of Philosophy of Mind will gradually disappear. Once neural mechanisms are fully understood, no metaphysical or phenomenological questions will remain. Pūrvapakṣa 2: First-person reports are unreliable. Because of introspective bias, confabulation, memory error and demand characteristics, scientific theory should rest only on objective behaviour and brain data. Pūrvapakṣa 3: Embodiment and 4E theories are fashionable vocabulary. That cognition cannot occur without brain, body and environment is trivial; but claims such as “the mind extends” blur the boundary of cognition. Pūrvapakṣa 4: Accepting the extended-mind thesis leads to cognitive bloat—the phone, library, internet, teacher and city would all become parts of the mind. The useful distinction between internal mechanism and external aid would disappear. Pūrvapakṣa 5: The language of predictive processing is too flexible; nearly every result can be fitted into a prediction/error framework. If falsification is difficult, explanatory power is reduced. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Pūrvapakṣa 6: Qualia or phenomenal consciousness is not a scientific concept. Once reportable access, discrimination and control are explained, retaining a separate problem of “what it is like” creates a pseudo-problem. Pūrvapakṣa 7: Component analysis of the self unnecessarily fragments ordinary personhood. In practical life the “I” is clear; philosophical decomposition overgeneralises from clinical exceptions. Pūrvapakṣa 8: Excessive caution about animal consciousness will encourage anthropomorphism. Without human language and report, inference about subjective states may become speculation. Pūrvapakṣa 9: Discussion of AI consciousness is premature. The impressive behaviour of current systems may arise from statistical patterning; philosophical speculation distracts from engineering reality. Pūrvapakṣa 10: The opposite side will say that if behaviour is human-like, discrimination on the basis of substrate is unjustified. To deny machine minds because of “carbon chauvinism” is biological prejudice. Pūrvapakṣa 11: Bringing social power and ethics into Philosophy of Mind diminishes conceptual clarity. Diagnosis, privacy, platform manipulation and similar matters belong to applied ethics, not to the ontology of mind. Pūrvapakṣa 12: Indian debates on self, no-self and citta are historically unrelated to modern cognitive science; comparison will inevitably generate anachronism. Pūrvapakṣa 13: For scientific realism, mental vocabulary may be temporary folk psychology; mature neuroscience may eventually eliminate categories such as intention, belief and desire. Pūrvapakṣa 14: The opposite objection is that brain science can never capture the meaning of subjective life; therefore empirical research is peripheral to the fundamental questions of philosophy. Uttarapakṣa Uttarapakṣa 1: Progress in neuroscience does not eliminate philosophy; it makes philosophy more precise. Finding a mechanism does not remove the question “What is the explanandum?” Concepts of consciousness, representation, cause, self and responsibility are presupposed even in experimental design. Uttarapakṣa 2: The fallibility of first-person reports does not end their scientific use. A thermometer also requires calibration; a data source may be fallible yet usable when its reliability conditions are known. Triangulation among report, behaviour and physiology is the appropriate method. Uttarapakṣa 3: The trivial version of embodiment should be separated from strong constitutive versions. There is extensive evidence for the causal importance of the body; whether the constitution of mind extends into body or environment requires case-specific argument. Uttarapakṣa 4: The cognitive-bloat objection is a useful filter for the extended-mind thesis. Apply criteria such as integration, availability, trust, automaticity, reciprocal coupling and vulnerability to removal. This avoids the conclusion that every tool is part of the mind. Uttarapakṣa 5: Predictive frameworks need explicit competing predictions. If a model cannot distinguish measurable patterns of surprise, perception, action or learning, it becomes rhetoric; a testable version remains valid as a research programme. Uttarapakṣa 6: Removing phenomenal vocabulary does not remove the phenomenon. The subjective character of pain, colour experience, dreams, mood and felt effort is a datum of human life. The issue is not whether one likes the word “qualia,” but how the first-person character of experience is related to science. Uttarapakṣa 7: Decomposing the self does not destroy ordinary personhood; it shows that personhood may be an organised unity of multiple capacities. Legal and ethical personhood is not wholly identical with these empirical components, so the basis of dignity can remain intact. Uttarapakṣa 8: Both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial are risks in animal consciousness. Comparative evidence from species-specific behaviour, neurobiology, flexible learning, motivational trade-offs and injury or pain responses provides a more balanced approach. Uttarapakṣa 9: Saying “not yet” about AI consciousness may be empirical caution, but criteria must be developed now— especially if future systems become autonomous, persistent, embodied or acquire affect-like control architectures. Uttarapakṣa 10: Substrate neutrality is a reasonable possibility, not a proof. Similar output does not guarantee similarity of internal causal organisation. Claims about machine minds should rest on architecture, dynamics and behavioural evidence together. Uttarapakṣa 11: Ethics is not an external addition. Judgements such as “the mind can be read,” “this is an attention disorder,” “this agent is responsible,” or “this system is conscious” generate institutional action. The normative consequences of a theory are therefore themselves philosophical objects. Uttarapakṣa 12: Comparative dialogue with Indian traditions becomes anachronistic only when direct equivalence or invented influence is asserted. Functional comparison is possible when axes of inquiry are explicit and historical context is preserved. Uttarapakṣa 13: The eliminability of folk-psychological vocabulary is both an empirical and a conceptual question. Belief and reason explanations play functional roles in behavioural prediction, law, education and interpersonal understanding; growth in neural vocabulary does not automatically establish replacement. Uttarapakṣa 14: Anti-scientific isolation is equally unacceptable. Claims about the irreducibility of subjective meaning are not exempt from empirical constraints. Lesions, stimulation, pharmacology, development and comparative cognition impose real limits on theories of experience. Combined Uttarapakṣa formula: “Neither the brain alone nor experience alone is sufficient; neither behaviour alone nor culture alone. Good explanation arises where different kinds of evidence test and constrain one another.” Indian Dialogue Indian philosophical traditions do not provide one uniform counterpart to the word “mind.” Manas, buddhi, citta, vijñāna, ātman, puruṣa, sākṣin, smṛti and saṃskāra occupy different ontological and soteriological roles in different systems; translation requires a conceptual map before equivalence. In the Nyāya tradition, cognition—jñāna or buddhi—is analysed as a quality of the self, while manas has a distinctive mediating role in the relation between sensory cognition and the self. This framework is not identical to a Cartesian mind because its ontology of self, qualities, substances, senses and objects is different. Nyāya’s pramāṇa tradition offers a methodological lesson for philosophy of mind: do not ask merely whether “knowledge occurred”; separately analyse its cause, object, error-condition, defeater and reliability. At this level a fruitful dialogue with contemporary cognitive epistemology is possible. Buddhist Abhidharma and later epistemological traditions, in rejecting a permanent self, developed analyses of momentary or causal mental processes, attention, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness. It would be simplistic to call this plural analysis a direct ancestor of the modern “bundle theory.” The doctrine of anātman should not be treated as fully equivalent to the current slogan “the self is an illusion.” Buddhist no-self arguments are situated within ethical-practical, causal and phenomenological contexts; the goals and evidence of modern self- model theories differ. Advaita Vedānta places consciousness as foundational reality, and discussion of witness-consciousness raises serious questions about first-person givenness. But such a metaphysical claim should not be presented as though it were an empirical finding of neuroscience. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ Sāṃkhya–Yoga distinguishes puruṣa from prakṛti and further distinguishes buddhi, ahaṃkāra, manas and other levels. This taxonomy is useful not as an exact map of modern cognitive modules but as an example of an alternative conceptual segmentation of subjectivity and mental function. Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya debates about cognition and self-awareness open the question whether cognition is self-luminous or known through a subsequent cognition. Comparison with contemporary higher-order theories of consciousness is possible, but the technical premises are not identical. Memory in Indian epistemology is connected with questions of identity, prior cognition, recognition and error. Whether memory is a pramāṇa, how reliable a causal trace is, and whether recognition yields new knowledge are debates that can provide conceptual contrasts for contemporary memory epistemology. It would be inappropriate to declare Buddhist Yogācāra or related debates about representation directly identical with modern “idealism” or predictive processing. Yet appearance, construction, object-representation and error can serve as shared axes of comparative inquiry. Indian traditions of meditative attention provide sources for the systematic cultivation of experience. Trained first-person observation is not a replacement for scientific measurement, but it may help refine phenomenological taxonomies as a supplementary data source—provided suggestion, tradition-specific theory and reporting bias are controlled. The status of the body is also not uniform. Yoga, psychophysical practices associated with Ayurveda, Buddhist analyses of feeling and attention, and ritual or ascetic disciplines offer different frameworks for the body–mind relation. The slogan “India always knew embodied cognition” substitutes triumphalism for evidence. In modern Indian philosophy, thinkers such as B. K. Matilal, J. N. Mohanty, Jonardon Ganeri and Arindam Chakrabarti have placed classical materials in dialogue with analytic and phenomenological vocabularies on self, consciousness and personhood. This scholarly method is more useful than direct equivalence. Parallel formula: Do not extract “answers” from Indian traditions for modern mind science; first extract alternative methods of questioning—who knows, what is the object of cognition, how error occurs, what awareness of awareness is, how far self- continuity extends, and how practice changes experience. Mithila’s Parallel Perspective Mithila’s intellectual history provides Philosophy of Mind primarily with methodological resources from Nyāya and Navya- Nyāya. Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya’s Tattvacintāmaṇi opened a new era of subtle analysis of cognition, inference, perception, testimony and epistemic conditions; it need not be called a historical precursor of neuroscience. Navya-Nyāya’s relational precision—its analysis of qualifier, qualificand, relation, locus, the content of cognition and absence— makes formal dialogue possible with contemporary questions about mental representation. What is shared is not historical identity but an analytical discipline suitable for comparison. In the Mithila-based scholastic method, pūrvapakṣa–uttarapakṣa is not merely a rhetorical ornament. Formulating an opponent’s strongest position, defining terms and testing the conditions of inference can become modern virtues in the evaluation of cognitive theory. In questions of perception, it is useful to divide the simple claim “I saw” into sense–object relation, conditions, defects, doubt, error and conceptualisation. Modern vision science supplies different mechanisms, but such conceptual decomposition can increase the clarity of empirical design. Nyāya’s theory of the self does not directly coincide with modern embodied or brain-based views. Parallel discussion is sound only when the question is explicit: How does the subject persist? What does memory continuity establish? At what level is there a bearer of agency? Which claim is constrained by which empirical evidence? To treat Mithila’s traditional Pañjī or genealogical continuity as evidence of a psychological self would be a category mistake. Social identity and phenomenal or minimal self belong to different levels; the history of the region itself demonstrates the importance of such distinctions. The Maithili experiential world of folk song, separation, migration, marriage, grief, flood and care can be a rich archive for studying the social embodiment of the affective mind. But literary expression is not clinical data; it is a qualitative source for lived meaning. Language as an external scaffold of cognition offers a distinctive Maithili case: bilingual or multilingual speakers may experience different lexical access, emotional resonance, memory cues and social identity in different contexts. This requires empirical study; intuition alone is not a conclusion. Practices involving Tirhuta and Devanagari scripts can open research questions about cognitive habit, literacy, visual recognition and cultural memory. Sweeping claims such as “script changes the brain” should not be made without experiment. The multilingual India–Nepal border environment in Mithila makes comparative research possible on social cognition, code- switching, identity attribution and the mental effects of institutional language. A political border is not itself a boundary of mind, but it can alter a learning ecology. Flood-prone Mithila illustrates a practical question in embodied cognition: navigation, risk memory, seasonal anticipation, community warning, bodily skill and local environmental cues can form a distributed knowledge system. This should not be romanticised as “indigenous wisdom”; reliability must be tested event by event. Migration offers a regional example of the digital extended mind. Migrant families may use smartphones, message archives, payment apps, maps, contact lists and video calls to sustain memory, coordination and belonging; loss of privacy or platform failure can therefore become a cognitive vulnerability. The principle of Mithila’s parallel perspective is: “precise definition + multilevel evidence + lived experience + historical caution.” With these four together, discussion of mind need become neither scholastic antiquarianism nor imitation of imported cognitive vocabulary. Final regional formula: “The study of mind may begin inside the brain, but life is connected with body, language, family, tools, river, migration and memory; while tracing these relations, evidence must be supplied separately for each causal claim.” Contemporary Applications In ICU and neurology practice, assessment of consciousness should not rest on a single indicator. Behavioural scales, repeated examination, imaging or electrophysiology when clinically warranted, medication state, sensory or motor limitations and family history can be triangulated to reduce diagnostic error. In anaesthesia monitoring, avoid the simple assumption “unresponsive = no experience.” Depth indicators are useful, but systematic study of patient variability, drug combinations and post-operative reports remains necessary. In pain medicine, self-report should receive default epistemic weight, especially where no objective biomarker exists. At the same time, behavioural and physiological alternatives should be developed for communication disability; suffering should not be denied merely because a scan does not display it. In dementia care, loss of autobiographical memory should not be equated with loss of personhood. Bodily preferences, affective responses, relationships, present agency and rights grounded in dignity provide independent bases for care. For brain–computer interfaces there is reason to treat neural data as more sensitive than ordinary health data; raw signals, inferred intentions, emotional states and identity predictions require purpose limitation, consent and deletion control. Policies on neurostimulation or cognitive enhancement should examine not only efficacy but also agency, authenticity, coercion, inequality and long-term reversibility. Pressure from workplaces or schools can weaken what appears to be voluntary consent. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Mental-health apps that predict mood should not write “risk score = diagnosis.” Uncertainty, false positives, crisis escalation procedures, human review, data privacy and local-language validation should be explicit. AI emotion-recognition systems should not claim certainty about inner states from faces or voices. Expression varies with culture, disability, masking, context and individual baseline; severe restrictions are appropriate in high-stakes uses. Public claims that a language model is conscious—or definitely non-conscious—should not be made without architectural and evidential grounds. Evaluation frameworks should report dimensions such as behaviour, memory continuity, self-model, global integration, recurrent dynamics, embodiment and valence separately. AI companion design should not mislead users about the ontological status of the system. Anthropomorphic language may increase engagement, but transparency is required about dependency, manipulation and risks to vulnerable users. Digital extended memory—cloud notes, photo archives, password managers and calendars—can become critical to a user’s cognitive routine. Portability, backup, export, offline access and account recovery are therefore parts of cognitive resilience. In education, “attention” should not be treated merely as a moral virtue. Sleep, nutrition, anxiety, disability, classroom design, device notifications and task difficulty all alter attentional performance; intervention should therefore be multilevel. VR and AR systems can alter body ownership and spatial presence. Alongside therapeutic uses, safeguards are needed for motion sickness, dissociation, harassment, biometric gaze or gesture tracking and post-session effects. For users of prosthetic and assistive technologies, empirical study of device embodiment can improve design: latency, sensory feedback, control reliability and the feeling of ownership can affect functional outcomes. Animal-welfare policy should use combined evidence from species-specific behaviour, learning, nociception, affective trade-offs and the precautionary principle, not nervous-system similarity alone. Workplace productivity software should not describe a “focus score” or “engagement” as mind-reading. Keyboard, mouse or eye data are behavioural proxies only; uncertainty of inference and worker consent are necessary. The platform attention economy is an applied field of Philosophy of Mind: infinite scroll, variable reward, notification timing and recommender systems shape attentional habits. Friction, time controls and transparent defaults can support user agency. Multilingual speech and AI systems should not infer inner thought from language preference. Language choice can reflect a mixture of proficiency, audience, stigma, emotion, institution and convenience. In clinical trials, subjective outcomes should not be dismissed as “soft data.” Validated scales, qualitative interviews and objective measures capture different dimensions and can be used together. In public communication, a colourful brain image should not be called a “photograph of the mind.” The limits of statistical maps, preprocessing, group inference and reverse inference should be explained to ordinary readers as an ethical responsibility. In the age of synthetic media and deepfakes, civic education should include the distinction between memory confidence and source memory. Vividness is not a guarantee of truth; provenance tools can become external scaffolds for cognitive self-defence. Contemporary formula: “Where technology makes inferences about the mind, accuracy alone is insufficient—concept validity, uncertainty, consent, reversibility and dignity are all required criteria.” Chapter Conclusion The most important change in the new questions of Philosophy of Mind is that the central issue is becoming less “Where is the mind?” and more “Which phenomenon is explained at which level, by what evidence?” Brain evidence is indispensable, but not sufficient on its own. The explanatory roles of neural correlation, causal intervention, behaviour, phenomenology, body, environment and social context should be kept distinct. First-person experience is not the enemy of scientific inquiry; its reliability conditions should be tested. Subjective report should be made neither an absolute authority nor an epistemic zero. Embodied, enactive and extended approaches challenge brain-centric simplification, but strong constitutive claims require clear criteria. Not every tool or environment is part of the mind. Predictive processing, global workspace, recurrent processing, higher-order theories and other frameworks can be useful as empirical programmes; the success of one theory is not by itself the final metaphysical solution to consciousness. The self can be understood as a layered organisation—ownership, agency, perspective, memory, narrative and social recognition. The fallibility of these components does not entail the dissolution of dignity or legal personhood. Questions of animal and machine consciousness should not be left to binary intuition. Multi-criterion evidence, comparative method and explicit reporting of uncertainty are more responsible. Neurotechnology connects Philosophy of Mind with ethical questions of privacy, autonomy, enhancement, manipulation and responsibility. The definition of a concept can produce institutional consequences. The contribution of Indian philosophy should be sought not in claims of historical precedence but in alternative conceptual segmentation, self/no-self debates, analyses of cognition and error, meditative phenomenology and pramāṇa-based rigour. Mithila’s Navya-Nyāya method is not a direct ancestor of modern mind science; yet its precision regarding definition, relation, defeaters, cognition-content and pūrvapakṣa–uttarapakṣa is a powerful methodological resource for comparative philosophy. The ideal of a new Philosophy of Mind is not a hurried unified monism but disciplined pluralism—multilevel explanation, cross- checking evidence, explicit uncertainty and ethical accountability. Final formula: “Do not stop science by saying the mind is a mystery; do not erase experience by saying there are brain data. Bring evidence together, distinguish levels, limit claims—only then will philosophy of mind become new.”