I know I have a brain I’ve seen it in xrays. But it is said we also have a mind but I can’t see it feel it or explain it yet it is there. I hear the words in my mind I think thoughts ideas words sentences and such. Could it be that the mind (is the spirit of the brain)? The brain is biological and material but the mind, what is mind? Thoughts from the mind please? pl
There seems to be a contradiction between the claim that you can’t see or feel the mind, and that you perceive words and thoughts in your mind. Regardless, how does your inability to directly experience the mind from outside lead to a conclusion that the mind is something spiritual or immaterial? Perhaps it could be, but it certainly doesn’t follow from the experience of mind that it must be or that spirit is the only explanation left. Let me flesh out these two counters:
First, you do experience your mind. You perceive yourself developing and expressing thoughts, these thoughts exist nowhere but in your mind, and yet you are aware of them. You can follow your thought processes, you can analyze your behavior in terms of your mind. To the extend that you can define what mind is, i.e. to the extent that questions you’re asking are meaningful, you can perceive your mind.
Second, mind is relatively well explained as an emergent process of the brain, and this explanation better captures observations than do theories of mind that rely on spirit or immaterial substance. Investigations into brain damage can correlate certain changes in the physical matter of the brain with very specific changes in the mind, including memory, reason, sensory processing, emotional response, and preferences. The nature of these observations goes a great distance to making a theory that the brain is somehow a receiver for some distinct immaterial entity of mind cumbersome, if not totally unworkable. By contrast, these observations lend greater support to the idea that the mind is like the operating system of a computer: distinct from the physical structure only to the extent that the description of it does not require reference to the specific physical parts, only to an abstracted set of requisite processes that fill certain roles in making the operating system work. The mind is best explained as something like the operating system of the brain, albeit one that perceives and processes its own states recursively.
Well, the biggest problem with that analogy is it includes the most mysterious part of what it’s trying to explain as a given. Operating systems don’t perceive anything. What it is to be an observer has to be accounted for if you’re going to talk about the mind- that’s consciousness.
Carleas has given a good “definition”, not so much “an explanation”.
If you want to study HOW the mind works (regardless of its physical embodiment) study the process of the US Congress. It is almost identical in every way.
Maybe YOUR mind works that way. 
I disagree that an operating system doesn’t perceive. Operating systems generally have limited sensory inputs, but they do receive input from mice, microphones, cameras, and network connections. Depending how they’re set up, they react to theses stimuli, and sometimes react to themselves reacting to the stimuli (for example, an anti-virus program being called in response to fishy networking activity).
For a classic game of burden-of-proof tennis: to say that this is not perception is to take as a given what’s being disputed. There’s nothing more to perception than sensory input and mental response. While a computer operating system has limited sensory input and limited mental response, it has a perception that is only proportionately limited in degree, and not different in kind.
JSS, isn’t a good definition the better part of an explanation?
Yes, well done, Carleas.
Thanks for this interesting topic.
In support, I’d like to start by asserting that philosophical discussions might be greatly enhanced by more shift of focus away from the content of thought, towards the nature of thought itself.
Given that all ideas are made of thought, any insights we might develop about the nature of thought may be relevant to an understanding of all ideas. Thus it can be argued that an examination of thought itself is a point of greatest leverage which would appeal to the efficiency minded philosopher who wants to get to the bottom of things.
This process might be compared to the oceanographer who previously took water for granted in his examination of fish etc, but then realized that his entire enterprise should be built upon an understanding of the properties of water, given that everything he wants to study is in water and made of water.
Thought is to the mind what water is to the ocean. All our little idea fish are made of thought, and are swimming around in thought. So as mindographers we can ask, what are the properties of thought? What is it’s nature?
Here I’d like to credit Jiddu Krishnamurti with the insight “thought is inherently divisive.” By divisive he doesn’t mean “argumentative”, but “to divide”. As example consider any noun, such as “tree”, whose function is to conceptually divide all of reality in to “tree” and “not tree”.
The divisive quality of thought allows thought to divide in to fragments, so that one fragment can observe other fragments. We call whatever fragment currently seems most prominent, the observer.
The divisive nature of thought is the essence of the human condition.
It allows one part of thought to stand back, examine, evaluate, challenge and correct other fragments of thought. That is, a built-in philosophy system, very useful!
The divisive nature of thought is also the source of all man made problems, that is, most of our problems. Thought divides “me” from “everything else”, creating all our social problems. Then “me” divides within itself, and we get all those little voices instead our head who so routinely get in to big arguments with each other, ie, our personal problems.
All the calamities you see on the news, all the little calamities going on privately inside of your own head, all have their source in the divisive nature of thought. As does a great deal of the good stuff that makes life rich and worthwhile.
As we read this post, one fragment of thought is splitting off from the others, and is looking down upon the fragment circus inside our heads from a detached perspective, and wondering how to manage this process of division, which is fundamental to everything else.
And by doing so, it adds to the division, and creates more thought fragmentation.
Hello Typist,
Very interesting post. Enjoyed your ‘chain-of-thought’. Particularly enjoyed your comment that “thought is inherently divisive”. (per J. Krishnamurti) You also said “The divisive nature of thought is the essence of the human condition.” Couldn’t resist mentally adding the term ‘sleeping’ just before ‘human’. Agree also with your following comments. Very engagingly phrased. It could be stated that your comments have caught Language (Thought) in the very act of playing its game.
Someone asked an interesting question…When you turn your head from left to right does your mind move ???
So we know lots of processes that we batch and call ‘the brain’. If this - the mind - is an emergent process, does this mean it is not one of these?
I do realize that many, really, all brain processes can be said to be emergent ones from simpler levels, so I am not saying that the fact that mind would be an emergent process means it is not brain, but the sentence (fragment) I quoted seem to imply that it emerges out of processes we have tracked ‘from the outside’ and thus emerges from them. Or?
Also it can be argued that facets of mind are emergent properties of this or that brain process. But consciousness? I am not sure we know what this does emerge from or what is necessary or sufficient for consciousness to be present in ‘matter’.
Thank you much.
Ah, I see. Thought couldn’t resist creating a division between sleeping humans and awake humans. Thought says to itself, I am divided, I must be undivided, thus creating another division.
I’m pretty sure agreeing is against the rules, but ok, I won’t tell. 
To the degree they are accurate, they have just caught thought being what it is. Like declaring that water is wet.
The predicament we face is that the very thing that makes us conscious and intelligent, the divisive nature of thought, is the same thing that makes us insane.
A cave man is walking through the woods and comes to stream too wide to cross. His thought divides the reality before him in to a collection of conceptual logs inside his head. He can arrange and rearrange all the conceptual logs in his head, until he conceptually finds the one long enough to cross the stream. Having identified the correct log virtually, he is spared the effort of having to test every log physically. Extremely useful!
But then he also conceptually divides himself from all of reality too, and becomes very lonely. This isolation fills him with pain and pisses him off, so he hits another cave man over the head with one of the logs, leading eventually to Hiroshima.
It sounds like perception is being defined as response following stimulus. Do you think that any case of this indicates consciousness?
It took an incredibly long time for scientists to allow the ‘pathetic fallacy’ even in relation to animals. Quietly and with meta-commenting on it for the most part, it became ok to talk about many of what we call facets of mind when writing about animals - in rigorous scientific contexts. Was it a mistake to be so conservative (or biased) in the scientific community against using such descriptive terms for animals? It would seem so if we are now going to start using them for machines.
But this may all be equivocation on the term perception, which for me includes experiencing or consciousness.
Consciousness is how things seem to me. How do things seem to your computer? I know what it’s like to be me. What’s it like to be a computer?
Typist:
The experiencer or center point of consciousness.
Is there some permanent entity which can be given the label of “center point”?
What I see looks more like a room full of cocktail party guests chattering away amongst themselves. At any given moment there’s often one of the party guests out on the veranda looking in on the party from a distance, but who that guest is seems to change from moment to moment. First it’s the wise guest, then the rude guest, then a sensible guest, then the court jester etc.
Could we say “the experiencer” is actually just a chair out on the veranda? A position, not a “person”?
The cocktail party guests are just chattering out loud here, asking questions, not offering answers.
I don’t know if it is permanent. Consciousness always has a center point.
Consciousness always has an intention and an object. Despite your description above, your expressed thought seems to be focused and centered and i take that as evidence that your consciousness is centered and objective.
A typing chair? According to my experience that only happens in cartoons.
That’s why I avoid cocktail parties.
The human mind is quite complex and is wonderful. It holds within it thoughts and knowledge of thousands, no millions of moments of information processed over years of manifold experiences. Some things we don’t remember but slip into the past as new memories enter and take over and yet many memories are still retained and brought up again in our remembrance years later. The mind has creative power, imagination, invention, understanding, communication, language [written and spoken]; processing information and remembering certain experiences through the senses=hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling. The mind knows the difference of the various emotions; happy, sad, disappointment, fear, love, hate, good, evil, trust. The mind instructs us in making decisions, choices, judgments, purpose.
On the same subject Augustine wrote " This power of memory is great, very great, my God. It is a vast and infinite profundity. Who has plumbed its bottom? This power is that of my mind and is a natural endowment, but I myself cannot grasp the totality of what I am. Is the mind, than, too restricted to compass itself, so that we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp? Surely that cannot be external to itself; it must be within the mind."
Perhaps Augustine’s question … we have to ask what is that element of itself which it fails to grasp … is answerwed in part by Carl Jung’s research on the subject he labelled ‘collective unconscious’. Seems self evident to me that humanity has been forever influenced by Jung’s notion and humanity has also forever been on a journey from collective unconsciousness to 'collective consciousness. Perhaps, if this notion of transition has any merit, we are approaching the point of 'critical mass?
A conscious human mind, awake or dreaming, involves a narrative in which the protagonist is an “I”. This is the mind’s focal point, as Felix recognizes. It is the this which must adapt to a that.
I don’t understand Jung’s point. When I was young, I knew nothing. Now that I am an adult, I know so much more. What is this ‘collective consciousness’ stuff? Are we all going to understand perfect knowledge? NOPE. Not in this life. ‘Critical Mass’, does he mean that we are all going to know so much that we can’t obtain any more knowledge? Sorry, I don’t get it, perhaps it’s over my head. No, we can never know too much. In fact, the more we know, the more we should realize we don’t know. Our mind is a gift from God, quite miraculous actually, that we are the only creation that can communicate language and reason. We ‘fail to grasp’ only that which God chooses not to reveal to us [right now]. He is All-Knowing and Infinite, and we are…umm…Not [for lack of a better definition]. God is so immense and overwhelming, who can understand His total being and nature? Only what He tells us of Himself in His Word and that is all. The mind is a wonderful thing to possess because it allows us to know and understand God to the degree that we can believe and worship Him as He desires. That is what we were created for.