It's quite a shame that your philosophy of mind class didn't cover recent philosophical research where neuroscience and empirical psychology are taken seriously.
There is plenty of philosophical work that attempts to make sense of recent advances in brain science. A lot of it is centered around the 'hard problem of consciousness', or the question of why we have phenomenal experiences at all (and how these correlate to neural events). Although most serious proponents discard dualism, not all of them agree that phenomenal experiences can be reduced to physical phenomena (Dave Chalmers, Thomas Nagel).
To the scientifically biased the idea that physicalism isn't true is abhorrent, but contemporary philosophy, although not univocal, has serious arguments against it. If you find yourself dismissing this idea right off the bat out of scientific intuition I would urge you to read up a little bit on modern philosophy of mind.
There is plenty of philosophical work that attempts to make sense of recent advances in brain science. A lot of it is centered around the 'hard problem of consciousness', or the question of why we have phenomenal experiences at all (and how these correlate to neural events). Although most serious proponents discard dualism, not all of them agree that phenomenal experiences can be reduced to physical phenomena (Dave Chalmers, Thomas Nagel).
To the scientifically biased the idea that physicalism isn't true is abhorrent, but contemporary philosophy, although not univocal, has serious arguments against it. If you find yourself dismissing this idea right off the bat out of scientific intuition I would urge you to read up a little bit on modern philosophy of mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie http://consc.net/papers/ncc2.html