The Mind and Body Problem

So after reading the week's cover article titled "Science and the Soul," in US News And World Report, I feel the need to voice my thoughts on what seems to be a growing topic of interest in both scientific and philosophical circles. As science seems to be gaining more and more ground in its description of how our brain works, our self perception seems to be gravitation more and more towards a material understanding. Brain research is now able to identify which chemicals are responsible for which emotions, and which receptor cell reactions correspond to certain emotions. This understanding has led certain scientists like Francis Crick to say perplexing things like, "You, your joys and sorrows, are in fact no more than the behavior of nerve cells and their molecules."

Perhaps I am missing something in the scientific research here, but I don't see why the scientific observation of certain brain chemicals corresponding to certain emotions leads to the conclusion that who I am as a human being is nothing other than these material reactions. Though I certainly have these brain cell reactions that happen when I experience joy, these reactions are insufficient to explain the experience of joy itself or why it is exactly that a certain event caused joy. Couldn't the causal sequence go the other way, and so our joys and sorrows are actually what causes these brain reactions.

I don't think I am resistant to believing in a merely material explanation for my existence because I somehow need to think I am something more for psychological reasons. It is just that I don't see how anything that is scientifically observable can account for what is by nature an immaterial experience (namely emotions).

Perhaps we might say that what happens in our brain is an integral part of the explanation of our feelings, but it is not enough.