Mind
From Wikinfo
There is considerable disagreement as to what is meant by the term, Mind.
The Random House unabridged dictionary refers to concious beings and says: The element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc. [1]
The American Heritage Dictionary disagrees. It says the mind resides in the brain, giving it the status of a bone or muscle. The human consciousness that originates in the brain says the American Heritage. [2]
We have two widely used, popular dictionaries that disagree. Other dictionaries, of good quality and wide repute, similarly disagree on this point. On one side (mind = brian = mind) as the American Heritage Dictionary does. And you find other dictionaries define what a human mind is by what it does. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary says that thinking is an act of the mind. Reasoning is an act of the mind, so is feeling, perceiving and judging (such as judging whether it is safe to cross the street). And Random House doesn't attempt to constrain the human mind to a particular brain cell or group of nerve cells.
To know a subject, it is necessary to understand what is being talked about. Originates in the brain (per American Heritage) puts the subject of the mind into the realm of biology and medicine. Is says the mind is physical, thereby limiting the subject to a physical organ. But yet Ppeople have recovered memory and have recovered bodily function when portions of the physical brain that normally handle those things were injured or even lost.
Here is an illustration of these two different ideas:
- When I think the thought, "I want a drink of water", I am using my mind. (Random House Unabridged)
- When I think the thought, "I want a drink of water", my brain has gone into activity and produced that thought. (American Heritage)< /br>
Both references recognize that mind is a word that represents an idea, the idea being that a mind exhibits activity, such as thoughts. But the American Heritage defines the mind by constraining it to part of a larger, more inclusive subject, the brain in the human body. Random House considers the mind is a subject all by itself. This is not a new disagreement, science does not have the tools to observe what is happening to a single brain cell from one individual to the next. And even within a single individual, science is unable to observe how a single brain cell interacts. We do know that we have thoughts. We do know that destroying parts of the brain results in a different ability. I the main we are sure the mind's activities of thinking and reasoning are somehow connected with the brain, but beyond that we simply don't know.
What we are sure of is that everyone has some control of their mind. The subject can be self-explored in a manner similar to exploring one's own finger or toe.
As a subject that is not fully known, the mind occurs in philosophy of mind and sometimes in other philosophy. It is addressed by religion, particularly by Scientology's Dianetics and in other theology, related to soul and spirit. The mind is considered to be central to psychology while psychiatry defines and then prescribes drugs for "disorders of the mind", but never defines a mind's normalcy.
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Substance or bundle?
There is a popular problem in philosophy about what the mind is, which can be presented as follows. It is commonplace to wonder what the mind, or soul (if you will), is. One can identify individual thoughts, individual feelings, in one's mind. But what is this mind that has these thoughts and feelings? One can imagine all sorts of mental goings-on, but what is it to imagine the mind itself? It seems the only way we have of understanding, by introspection, what our minds are is by considering various particular thoughts, feelings, decisions, and other events in our minds (i.e., mental events).
So, someone might boldly maintain that we really do not have a mind, or a soul, per se--at least, we do not have any mind or soul that is distinct from our thoughts, perceptions, and other mental events. All there are is a series of thoughts and feelings that are associated with our bodies. There are no minds that are something over and above these thoughts and feelings. This would be the view of someone who held a bundle theory about the mind. The Scottish philosopher David Hume held a theory of mind like this.
The view of common sense, it seems, is opposed to a bundle theory of the mind. We seem to have a mind, or soul, which is distinct from our thoughts and feelings--and that mind is just exactly what we call our selves. Hume seems to want to deny that there is such a thing as the self. To some people this seems absurd. To them, a substance theory of mind will seem more attractive. On this view, one holds that there is something--one may not know what, but something--which has the thoughts and feelings, and the thoughts and feelings are in our minds, in about the same way that properties inhere in a substance.
Philosophers have not infrequently bandied the phrase "mental substance," and indeed, it has been made central to the ontologies of several philosophers, including most notably Gottfried Leibniz; according to Leibniz, the monad, a "simple soul," is that in terms of which everything else in the universe was to be explained. The notion of mental substance is also basic to the dualism of Rene Descartes. David Hume was very famous for advocating a bundle theory of mind.
Psychological Experiments on Mind-Body relations
In a study patients were asked to flex the index finger of their right hand suddenly at various times of their own choosing while the electrical signals in their brain were being recorded on an EEG. It was found that there was a gradual build-up of recorded electric potential for a second or a second and a half before the finger was actually flexed, indicating that the unconscious mind had made the decision before the conscious mind decided to act. Or, the actual initiation of volition may have begun earlier in some other part of the brain.
In another experiment on patients undergoing brain surgery, it took about half a second to register a stimulus applied to the skin, despite the fact that the brain would have received the signal of the stimulus in about a hundredth of a second and the pre-programmed reflex response takes only about the tenth of a second.
References
- ^ Random House unabridged, top of page
- ^ the American Heritage Dictionary (definition 1) and middle page (definition 1)
See also
Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Mind" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
