Mind

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Template:Alternateuses Template:Portalpar Mind refers to the collective aspects of human intellect and consciousness that originate in the brain and which are manifest in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.

There are many theories of what the mind is and how it works, dating back to Plato, Aristotle and other Ancient Greek philosophers. Pre-scientific theories, which were rooted in theology, concentrated on the relationship between the mind and the soul, the supposed supernatural or divine essence of the human person. Modern theories, based on a scientific understanding of the brain, see the mind as a phenomenon of psychology, and the term is often used more or less synonymously with consciousness.

The question of which human attributes make up the mind is also much debated. Some argue that only the "higher" intellectual functions constitute mind: particularly reason and memory. In this view the emotions - love, hate, fear, joy - are more "primitive" or subjective in nature and should be seen as different in nature or origin to the mind. Others argue that the rational and the emotional sides of the human person cannot be separated, that they are of the same nature and origin, and that they should all be considered as part of the individual mind.

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Thought

In popular usage mind is frequently synonymous with thought: It is that private conversation with ourselves that we carry on "inside our heads" during every waking moment of our lives. Thus we "make up our minds," "change our minds" or are "of two minds" about something. One of the key attributes of the mind in this sense is that it is a private sphere. No-one else can "know our mind." They can only know what we communicate.

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Nature of the mind

Both philosophers and psychologists remain divided about the nature of the mind. Some take what is known as the substantial view, and argue that the mind is a single entity, perhaps having its base in the brain but distinct from it and having an autonomous existence. This view ultimately derives from Plato, and was absorbed from him into Christian thought. In its most extreme form, the substantial view merges with the theological view that the mind is an entity wholly separate from the body, in fact a manifestation of the soul, which will survive the body's death and return to God, its creator.

Others take what is known as the functional view, ultimately derived from Aristotle, which holds that the mind is a term of convenience for a variety of mental functions which have little in common except that humans are conscious of their existence. Functionalists tend to argue that the attributes which we collectively call the mind are closely related to the functions of the brain and can have no autonomous existence beyond the brain - nor can they survive its death. In this view mind is a subjective manifestation of consciousness: the human brain's ability to be aware of its own existence. The concept of the mind is therefore a means by which the conscious brain understands its own operations.

If we follow the pantheistic view, Mind is synonymous with Soul, and emanates (since it is non-dimensional, or trans-dimensional) from the Spirit (the essence that can manifest itself through any level in pantheistic hierarchy/holarchy - as a mind/soul of a single cell (with very primitive, elemental consciousness), a human or animal mind/soul (with consciousness on a level of organic synergy of an individual human or animal), or a (superior) mind/soul with synergetically extremely complex and sophisticated consciousness of whole galaxies involving all sub-levels. Spirit (essence) manifests as - Soul/Mind. And the (non-physical) Soul/Mind is a 'driver' of the body. Therefore, the body, incl. the brain, is just a 'vehicle' for the physical world (if we, for example, have a whole planet as a 'body' then its brain is the synergetic super-brain that involves all the brains of species with a brain, on that planet).

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History of the philosophy of the mind

According to Neo-Platonism, nondual Spirit manifests as Soul or Mind. Mind is synonymous with Soul, and emanates from the Spirit (the essence that can manifest itself through any level in the cosmic hierarchy/holarchy, from the mind/soul of a single cell (with prehension – very primitive, elemental consciousness), a human or animal mind/soul (with consciousness on a level of an individual human/animal), or an oversoul, with consciousness of whole galaxies involving all sub-levels. And the (non-physical) Soul/Mind is a 'driver' of the body. Therefore, the body, including the brain, is just a vehicle for the physical world.

A leading exponent of the substantial view was George Berkeley, an 18th century Anglican bishop and philosopher. Berkeley argued that there is no such thing as matter and what humans see as the material world is nothing but an idea in God's mind, and that therefore the human mind is purely a manifestation of the soul or spirit or similar. This type of belief is also common in certain types of spiritual non-dualistic belief, but outside this field few philosophers take an extreme view today. However, the view that the human mind is of a nature or essence somehow different from, and higher than, the mere operations of the brain, continues to be widely held.

Berkeley's views were attacked, and in the eyes of many philosophers demolished, by T.H. Huxley, a 19th century biologist and disciple of Charles Darwin, who agreed that the phenomena of the mind were of a unique order, but argued that they can only be explained in reference to events in the brain. Huxley drew on a tradition of materialist thought in British philosophy dating to Thomas Hobbes, who argued in the 17th century that mental events were ultimately physical in nature, although with the biological knowledge of his day he could not say what their physical basis was. Huxley blended Hobbes with Darwin to produce the modern materialist or functional view.

Huxley's view was reinforced by the steady expansion of knowledge about the functions of the human brain. In the 19th century it was not possible to say with certainty how the brain carried out such functions as memory, emotion, perception and reason. This left the field open for substantialists to argue for an autonomous mind, or for a metaphysical theory of the mind. But each advance in the study of the brain during the 20th century made this harder, since it became more and more apparent that all the components of the mind have their origins in the functioning of the brain.

Huxley's rationalism, however, was disturbed in the early 20th century by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who developed a theory of the unconscious mind, and argued that those mental processes of which humans are subjectively aware are only a small part of their total mental activity. Freudianism was in a sense a revival of the substantial view of the mind in a secular guise. Although Freud did not deny that the mind was a function of the brain, he held the mind has, as it were, a mind of its own, of which we are not conscious, which we cannot control, and which can be accessed only though psychoanalysis (particularly the interpretation of dreams). Freud's theory of the unconscious, although impossible to prove empirically, has been widely accepted and has greatly influenced the popular understanding of the mind.

More recently, Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Gödel, Escher, Bach - an eternal Golden Braid", is a tour de force on the subject of mind, and how it might arise from the neurology of the brain. Amongst other biological and cybernetic phenomena, Hofstadter places tangled loops and recursion at the center of Self, Self-awareness, and perception of oneself, and thus at the heart of Mind and thinking. Likewise philosopher Ken Wilber posits that Mind is the interior dimension of the brain holon. That is, that mind is what a brain looks like internally, when it looks at itself.

Quantum physicist David Bohm had a theory of mind that is most comparable to Neo-Platonic theories. "Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us..."Template:Fact

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Current research

The debate about the nature of the mind is relevant to the development of artificial intelligence. If the mind is indeed a thing separate from or higher than the functioning of the brain, then presumably it will not be possible for any machine, no matter how sophisticated, to duplicate it. If on the other hand the mind is no more than the aggregated functions of the brain, then it will be possible, at least in theory, to create a machine with a mind.

The Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative (MBB) at Harvard University aims to elucidate the structure, function, evolution, development, and pathology of the nervous system in relation to human behavior and mental life. It draws on the departments of psychology, neurobiology, neurology, molecular and cellular biology, radiology, psychiatry, organismic and evolutionary biology, history of science, and linguistics.

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See also

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External links

da:Mental de:Geist eo:Menso fr:Esprit ia:Mente it:mente pl:Umysł pt:Mente ru:Ментальность simple:Mind fi:Mieli nl:Geest zh:心灵

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