I notice this coming up a lot in the last couple of days. A lot of people throw this phrase around as if it is thoroughly transparent and and self-evident, but I am not sure that we, including myself, have any grasp of what we mean by this expression. Of course, clarifying exactly what we are referring to when using the concept “mind” would be philosophically helpful as well. So, anyone want to take a stab?
Not existing within a tangible realm.
And yet having some kind of existence differing from things in the tangible realm?
And by tangible realm, you mean things that physical entities can come directly in contact with, for example?
Interestingly, we don’t seem to have much trouble distinguishing things “in the mind” and things “external to the mind” in our everyday existence. The couch in my living room is external, my thinking about the coffee stain on it is in my head. My hot girlfriend is external, my feeling of desire for her is in the mind. Yet when we philosophically reflect, these distinctions begin to become confused it seems. So what then do we really mean by this phrase both in everyday practice and in philosophy, if the two uses are not identical.
Sometimes different from things in the tangible realm, though not necessarily. It could be thoughts and observations about things in the physical realm, but the thoughts themselves are not part of the physical realm.
That is half of what I mean by tangible realm, the other half of what I mean is anything that is definitve while thoughts are often vague.
Is saying that something is in the mind the same as saying that it is in consciousness? I think these two statements are equivalent.
Ok lets say we count the numbers of cushions in a room. You count a different number cushions than I do. Its because you are making different distinctions than I am. If I ask you about lets say philosophy and you reply such and such and then I say yes he knows philosophy. Its becuase you have shown adaquate conduct.
The mind I believe has not been adaquatly defined. A biological computer is a weak explainatory value, precisely because it has a deterministic end seeking machine directed by the exicution of a program. Which brings the question, who is the programer? Its has a conscious finality to it.
I don’t think, doesn’t account for the sub-conscious.
Doh! I mean, I guess some people still reject the notion of a subconscious, but I don’t so you’re right. Ok. Being in the mind is not the same as being in consciousness. You have discovered a truth.
It was probably discovered long before I came around.
And just because I logically proved it, it still requires the positing of the concept of the, “sub-conscious,” and even then, is not necessarily truth.
I appreciate your sentiment, though.
I don’t suspect there is any useful clarification of that phrase “exists in the mind”. For one, I don’t understand what “mind” means unless we are referring merely to brain-states. In that case, “existing in the mind” would be some unique structure of brain-states. In that case, I don’t find it difficult to imagine that “existing outside the mind” would be clarifying by the same token. Most people are skeptical of this approach, however. I, on the other hand, don’t see this as any more mysterious than the idea that there is something beyond brain-states called the mind; at least brain-states are within the realm of testability. For everything else, use master card. No, for everything else, we can only shrug.
There is that which has it’s existence in ‘thoughts’ ‘from’ the brain.
‘Thoughts’ are excreted by a functioning brain.
The ‘functioning brain’ i[/i] exists within ‘Mind/Consciousness’ (all there can ‘be’).
Existence is in Consciousness/Mind.
I would certainly argue along the lines of an instinctive distinction between what exists in the external world and what exists only in the mind. My laptop, for example, exists in the world. My belief that the laptop exists is in my mind. I think a general linguistic consesnsus probably exists as to which things are which - and for me that is enough evidence that there is a distinction to be made. But this is philosophically questional - afterall I only have access to things which are in my mind, not to things external or indipendent from it. So really, the answer is everything we know, percieve, feel and believe is in the mind. I’m an anti realist - so I believe that everything that is relevent or impotrant (or even discussable) is in the mind.
Another stimulating question to ask is what is not in the mind?. Philosophically, of course, an answer only exists if you believe in an external reality, if you are a realist or anti-realist. If so, then you can agree that there are mind indipendent objects causing are sense-data experiences - but have wacky metaphysical arguments over what they may be. Idealists have a much easier answer to the questions ‘what’s in the mind?’ and 'what’s not in the mind? - everything and nothing!
I find it interesting how in the history of philosophy, at least western philosophy, this question has been answered in many different ways, and in particular by partitioning the mind up into categories and saying of some that they are real and of others that they are ‘in the head’. If we can assume that man began life as a naive realist, then everything in the mind (save, perhaps, the imagination) was regarded as real. Sensations were tangible objects. Beliefs were truths. Emotions were values (i.e. good and bad) that were attributed to people and situations as though it were an objective fact.
Then Plato came along and said our sensory experiences are only shoddy reflection of much more divine, but invisible, world, but this world could still be grasped by the intellect. So sensation became ‘in the head’ and intellectual understanding became the real world. Then millennia later, the scientific revolution took hold and the reverse perspective became popular. Now sensory experiences reflected the real world and our intellectual understanding became ‘in the head’ (i.e. it was only real if it agreed with empirical testing). Even during the heyday of the scientific revolution, we say the emergence of idealism and phenomenalism. Idealism took everything (i.e. all categories) to be mental. Phenomenalism did almost the same except for (at least in Kantian metaphysics) our understanding that there is a real (noumenal) world. We even came to see the emergence of the romantics who believed emotion could lead us to truth, and therefore had some ‘reality’ to them.
So I conclude from all this that everything we feel, everything we can be aware of, think about, refer to, or otherwise be consciously in touch with in one manner or another has a way of seeming real but also of seeming mental. History seems to show that we have a lot of freedom to decide which categories of mental experiences we allot the label ‘reality’ and which merely ‘mental’.
So do you have a personal normative opinion on what should be considered part of the mind / mental and what should be regarded as external to that?
Everything we know, everything we percieve, everything we believe and all the information we have available to us is in the mind. I believe that there are things external to us that cause our sensory experiences, but that whatever these are we have no direct access to them (indirect realism) and that they therefore should not be considered as truth conditions (against the correspondence theory), as considering them as such this will lead to indeterminacy and eventually skepticsm.
Therefore, precisely what exists outside of the mind is not either knowable or interesting (well, interesting in the philosophical sense - actually its really interesting in a maybe-we’re brain in the vats or matrix prsoners kind of way).
Cool. I definitely disagree with you about perception though. What we perceive just ARE external objects and how we come to know them is via perception. Perception isn’t infallible, but it is in my opinion the mechanism, along with our intelligence/understanding/etc. that allows us to have direct contact with the “external world.”
My opinion is rather unorthodox. I think the problem is that we assume it’s either/or. I think the perception and the perceived are always one. So sensations are tangible things in the world. Beliefs are truths. Emotions are value. etc. etc. etc.
I have a whole website (see my sig) expressing my views on this matter.
Cool I’ll check that out
aha! so you would be a direct realist?
I think you can sum up our two positions like this:
I believe in indirect realsim. I believe that when we percieve the model goes something like this: External world > mental images > Perception of mental images. The external world causes mental images which we percieve. All we can have experience of is the mental images - not of the external world itself. (This is a largely Lokean model, I believe).
You believe that our contact with the world is direct, more like world > perception. We are able to directly percieve the external world without any middle realm of interpretation.
I have a lot of respect for your position (if my interpretation of it is correct) - it solves so many problems that I’m always tempted by it myself! If it is true - then it would lead to the conclusion that we do have knowledge of the external world, that the correspondence theory of truth is perfectly acceptable and that skeptical doubts are compltely solved (what do you mean there’s no external world - I can see it!).
My question, though, is this: how do you differentiate between real perception and hallucinations? On the direct realist’s interpreation, what is happening when we are blantantly not percieving the real world but think that we are? I can’t think of a sufficient way to account for this without lapsing back in to indirect realism. The argument, which I recklessly steal from (plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/ [and them from Hume]), is :
- When one is subject to an illusion, one is aware of something’s having a quality, F, which the real ordinary object supposedly being perceived does not actually have.
- When one is aware of something’s having quality F, then there is something of which one is aware which does have this quality.
- Since the real object in question is, by hypothesis, not-F, then it follows that in cases of illusion, either one is not aware of the real object after all, or if one is, one is aware of it only “indirectly” and not in the direct, unmediated way in which we normally take ourselves to be aware of objects.
- There is no non-arbitrary way of distinguishing, from the point of view of the subject of an experience, between the phenomenology of perception and illusion (see e.g., Robinson 1994: 56–7; Smith 2002: 26–27).
- Therefore there is no reason to suppose that even in the case of genuine perception one is directly or immediately aware of ordinary objects.
- Therefore our normal view about what perceiving is—sometimes called “naïve realism” or “direct realism”—is false. So perception cannot be what we normally think it is.
Do you have a response? Can your model survive? Or will you have to concede and agree that we have no direct access to the real world? 
