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Mind is not Brain
What is the mind? Most of us think about it as a storehouse of ideas and memories. It is the place where we experience the world. Sometimes we think about it as a movie screen that exists in our head and plays a continuous feature film of the world with us in the staring role. Or we think of it as a computer that tells us what to think and figures things out for us.
What is the relationship between the mind and the brain? If we don’t think too deeply we probably simply think that whatever the mind is, it happens inside the brain. We all know that the brain is the place where little electrical signals snap back and forth and that somehow all of those electrical impulses add up to our experience of the world – our thoughts, sensations, feelings and memories.
The fact is that no one knows what relationship that spongy grey thing under our skull has to our experience of mind. It is just a big question mark. Sure people have theories, but no one knows.
Recently I read Alva Noe’s book Out of Our heads for the second time. I don’t know if Dr. Noe would consider himself a Pragmatist but he is certainly starting from a Pragmatic assumption about reality. He starts with the assumption that the best way to understand what the mind is is to look at it functionally – what does the mind do for us?
The mind allows us to interact with the world. Minds grow in relationship with the world and at least according to Noe they only exist in relationship to the world. Mind is not something that exists in the brain although some brain function is certainly related to the mind. Mind exists partly in the brain, but also in the body, in our body’s interaction with the world, and in the world itself.
Mind is an ongoing, self organizing relationship of human beings and the world. Rather than thinking of the mind as a movie screen, or a computer, Dr. Noe believes that we should think of it as a dance.
If you go to a dance performance and the person next to you leaned over in the middle of it and asked, “Where is the dance?” You would look at him oddly. But, where is the dance? The dance is not in the brains of the dancers although the brains of the dancers are involved with the dance. The dance is also not in the body of any one dancer although the bodies of all the dancers are involved in the dance. The dance exists in the relationship with all of the dancers and the stage and the costumes and the scenery. The dance is the whole interacting event.
In the same way Dr. Noe says that we should not look for the mind in the brain. The mind is the whole interactive event of human beings living in relationship with the world. It is not a thing, it is an achievement. Just like a dance is an achievement. The mind is a performance that includes events that happen in the brain, but is not limited to them.
I love this exploration of what the mind is. Its kind of funny how we really do think the mind is just in the brain and when you examined it closer, I could see how it is so much more. All of a sudden I felt expanded. The mind really is the best invention ever and it seems the more we realize what a powerful tool it is, the more potential is at our finger tips.
“The world is not round…………………… anyone can see that! It is flat! The Sun revolves around the earth. People lived with dinosaurs.” These could have been historic blog headings.
There is no empirical evidence that the mind is not brain…………….most evidence suggests that it is. We may not YET explain mind as brain BUT it’s looking like within 10-20 years we will have an understanding of consciousness…… that the world is not flat changed us utterly.
My question is if it is “proven” that “mind is brain how” does that affect our answers to the big questions………….who are we, why are we here, how are we to be.
Thanks, Jeff. I find that metaphor of mind as a dance very illuminating.
Ryan
Our brains / our minds
Can I submit that the brain can be thought of as hard-drive and the mind all the software that’s input into that computer? Like all analogies, this may be oversimplified and limited but it sort of describes the difference between the two entities, I submit.
Yes, I agree with Frank, the dance analogy is excellent.
No, I don’t agree mind is a product of brain as Anonymous seems to conclude. The Vedic view, one I highly regard, says that the mind is independent of the brain (body). The brain body is like an antenna that vibrates in sympathy with a particular mind set. If you are identified completely with the body, then all that goes on in your brain you naturally assume is manufactured by the brain. This is like saying the parts make the whole, a concept rejected not only by Vedic sages, but by people like Buckminster Fuller, the American sage of mid to later 20th century, among a host of others.
In the enlightened view, the whole makes the parts, not the other way around. Mind is a whole, although it is also an effect of intellect and intellect is a derivative of consciousness (soul or purusha). These distinctions are stops on the fractal hierarchy of being each one more limited as one descends from consciousness, to intellect, to mind, to body (brain), to organism, to cell, to molecule, to atom, to particle, to prana (plenum or prakriti or aether).
This is not just fanciful imaginings. There are beings (people being one class of beings) who can and do operate from these states of manifestation. There are people who avail themselves to all these states of being and those who restrict themselves to one or the other of these states of being all of which makes the world go around. We have the option of picking our context, adapt the operating system of that state and wham!,,, enjoy the ride.
Personally, to restrict myself with the brain which I was doing while in college, lead to a serious confrontation with despair induced by existential estrangement. That is when I began looking for a bigger context and found it once I encountered India metaphysics and my guru, Swami Chidananda. Yes, gurus are important, crucial. They offer context!!!
It seems clear to me that our current crop of pragmatist, neuroscientific philosophers of mind are avoiding the problem of what “mind is” by taking the view that mind is what brain does. Its an activity, not a thing. So it isn’t real in the physical sense that the brain is real. Now if you want to grant abstract entities “existence” of some sort, that’s your business, but pragmatically, I think that kind of existence doesn’t have any import and can be ignored. Brains think and brains activate muscle, moving bodies around.
I think that the idea, finally, of the embodied mind is a real advance in our ability to finally free ourselves of Decartes’ great error and get on with understanding brain and mind. I love how Noe points out that the physical basis of human mind extends beyond the physical boundaries of mind.
Just having been at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in DC, I’m even more convinced that the great advance of the last decade in brain science is finally being able to observe more or less directly how perception and choice, mental contracts, are performed by brain. Mind is what brain does, as dance is what the body does.
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I also liked the mind as “dance” part. But then you quickly lost me. Soon I just saw a screen of fanciful words, then just squiggles of characters. “Mind is an achievement” sounds like fluff to me. We are taught, above all, that mind is a process. But is it? A process implies causation, logical sequence. Maybe it’s merely a powerful illusion, as Einstein showed in his equations. Are mind and perception insoluble? Or can they be separated? Is identity part of mind? What’s the difference between mind and self? These questions are as old or older than antiquity. For me the pivotal question lies with the “nothing but” argument that states the mind is “nothing but” the neurons and their electro-chemical interactions. It seems to me the most important discussion since the choices are radically different and hold important consequences for how human societies function. Mind outside the brain or mind inside the brain, or partly in and partly out.