If I write a note to myself on a piece of paper, is that paper part of my mind? If not, how come? Doesn’t a memory count as mental content, even if it is outsourced? Is it by definition that “my mind” is limited to the region I call “my brain”, or is there a more substantial reason to make this distinction. Does it have to do with what is publicly accessible? If so, and if Ramachandran is right that our mental contents are in theory publicly accessible, would that then mean I don’t have a mind to call my own? Does the word “mind” then become meaningless?
Where did your understanding of ‘mind’ come from? From you?
Well, sure, from my POV it did come from you because you have it. Also, if I didn’t have before this, I could get a little knowledge about it from you.
Where its inception lies is a clue to the inception of your mind.
Not really sure what you mean, finishedman, but I’ll take a chance and make a comment or two…
Yes, from me. Also, it’s my cultural inheritance. And it’s likely natural, as a human being, to have a certain kind of understanding of human being-y things.
If you have some knowledge of my mind, is that mind really mine, and mine only?
That may be the case.
Unless you are making up something you call mind, your mind is where you left it. All you have to do is remember where you saw it. If it’s an object then just like any object it can be hidden, so you have to get out and look for it. Check the house first.
There’s some experimental evidence that our physical sense of ‘presence’ or ‘center of self’ locates itself at the crossover point of our prcepetions. For example, it’s fairly easy to confuse a subject by hooking them up to goggle-TVs that send back pictures from the POV of a Dummy and create the illusion of switching bodies.
That’s maybe not what you mean, but it’s as close as I can get.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003832
I don’t think my mind is an “it”. Thus, the to-do list I just jotted down on a piece of paper is part of my mind. That’s my theory at the moment. What do you think?
Just read the abstract - awesome! I’ll read more
The knowledge you have about the mind is the mind. If it is possible for you to be free from this knowledge, then for you there is no mind. The mind and the knowledge you have about the mind are one and the same. There may be something like the mind, but you will never know that. It can’t become part of your conscious thinking.
Wanting is thinking. As long as you want to do anything – I want to understand myself,' I want to know where mind is,’ that is thinking. You need thinking just to function in this world. But other than that, anything you want is thinking. You get the material for thinking always from somebody. Otherwise, there is no thinking.
If the material is not from you, then, when you are not there, what is there is just the knowledge, the memory in the background. When the memory is used, the illusion of ‘you’ appears as a coordinator of knowledge. Actually what is there is a temporary coordination when a demand is made. When the demand has been finished, the illusion of coordinator is gone.
What about the knowledge I might have about the mind in the future?
You seem to be saying that mind is limited to whatever I currently (and consciously) think about it?
define ‘think’ … how do you look at thought? What do you use?
Why are you asking me about what is yours to think about? Subjectivism, sir. Whatever the nature of my experiences, they have no precise relation to yours. However I translate what enters my brain constitutes me and you, yours. Even though we draw from a common fund of societal ‘mind,’ uncommon translations of abstracts will prevail.
Your mind is inside God’s brain; he ate it.
No.
Because thought becomes lost in (written) translation.
Not necessarily, memories are projected events.
Yes, minds are socialistic and/or individualistic.
If your mind is socialistic then your thoughts are not necessarily in “your brain” as you may not own them.
If your mind is individualistic then your thoughts are necessarily in “your brain” as you own them.
It means you don’t “own” your thoughts; somebody else might own your thoughts or think for you.
Reading a philosopher/author is a perfect example. You are stealing/eating/consuming the thoughts of another. They are not yours. You do not own them (the foreign thoughts). But, as you digest them, like food, those thoughts eventually “become yours” depending on how well they integrate inside your brain. Some people get heartburn and indigestion when eating the thoughts of another; some people’s thoughts taste horrible; some taste good. It depends on the types of thoughts.
Most people are consumers of thought, not producers of thought!!! Don’t let anybody fool you; most people do not “think for themselves” nor will they ever even consider such a thing. Producing takes a lot more work, than consuming. Imagine sitting down and writing The Critique of Pure Reason. You would shit a brick. Your book would probably suck; nobody would read it. And people may just find the only use for your writing is to throw in a wood stove and use for kindling.
So if you read a lot, and never write, this generally is a good indication that you are a consumer of thought and not a producer of it.
Like when people only argue about which philosophers said what and when, these types of people are not producers of philosophy, but consumers of it: sophists.
No.
Debaitor,
I like your take on this, a very interesting perspective. I may not agree, but find it intellectually stimulating none-the-less. My primary disagreement is this–
This would likely be true if not for interpretation. Those thoughts are yours, and only yours, as an interpretation of your input. The resulting perspective is bound to be unique in some way. Philosophers, in particular, seem not only to recognize this, but also provoke it – Nietzsche being one of my favorite examples. “Stealing” and “consuming” hold very different implications, for instance. Stealing implies a change of ownership; the ‘product’ doesn’t change but the owner does (or claims to). Consuming, on the other hand, implies an input which is processed to yield some output (a perspective, in this context).
Totally. God eats minds, then craps thoughts for all of us to consume.
It just means, to me, that some people (philosophers/thinkers) are producers. It is in their/our nature to produce thoughts for others to consume.
We are like the ‘farmers’ of the world, in a sense. Rather than producing 1000 acres of apples for the world to eat, we instead produce 1000 real units of thoughts for the world to eat. And the more technology increases, the more philosophers feed the masses, with thought.
I don’t see how you disagree. Isn’t interpretation the same as consumption? Not everybody’s stomach/body digests the same foods in the same ways. While one person may enjoy apples, another may thoroughly reject it. Is there any food universally liked? Chocolate, perhaps, is closest? It turns out the blandest, dullest, shit thoughts are the ones everybody readily accepts. It’s like eating noodles or bread; it’s universal in the sense that when we are starving; we’ll eat goddamned near anything. And perhaps moldy bread produces moldy thoughts.
We are what we eat, after all.
All that said, how one digests thoughts, and which specialized fields of thoughts/information people consume, be they philosophical, scientific, religious…physics perhaps, chemistry, psychology, sociology…it is determined by your particular tastes. One person may become obsessed with eating biological facts/thoughts/information, like a person can become obsessed with eating tacos and enchilidas.
It seems like a fitting metaphor:
[size=150]Food for Thought![/size]
I can point at anything and say “that is part of X” - where X is mind, or X is hippity dippity, or X is anything else. But as long as I am pointing in this way then X must be a locatable physical it or object.
Okay, then can you point to it, show it so it can be touched?
Just tell me where it is since I’m not there with you at the moment.
How about seeing how far we can stretch a metaphor on a rainy Wednesday? 
I have car insurance. It’s a contract with an insurance company in which I pay them money in return for their promise to pay me money if an accident or crime takes place to my disadvantage. I also have a piece of paper with my policy details on.
My insurance isn’t folded neatly in half and filed in a folder. I don’t have to have the paper physically to hand at the point my car is stolen in order to be insured. Insurance isn’t anywhere, it’s a relation or a disposition. I am insured, so the company is disposed to pay me money when I make a valid claim.
There are physical things associated with insurance - a policy paper, for instance, and a document detailing the terms and conditions. A person sitting in an office answering my call, and the computer on which they fill in the details. But these aren’t the insurance. They’re necessary for the insurance. The insurance is the abstraction of relations and dispositions, agreements and expectations and behaviours that explains the physical actions and objects that take place. As an aside - disposition is best described as a modal property, I think. If a glass rod is bent, it will eventually snap, not deform plastically. Glass is brittle, and brittleness is the disposition to snap suddenly under certain circumstances.
To return to the mind, there is an extent to which a lot of the workings of the mind take place in the public sphere. We describe someone as intelligent because of their behaviour and approach to problems, their disposition to focus their attention and make associations when confronted with them. Or as aggressive because of their body language, the things they say, the tone with which they say them. When someone’s conscious but unresponsive, we take various cues from their behaviour to say they are ignorant, rude, lost in thought, enraptured. These are all aspects of mind that abstract from complexes of public behaviour and method. But insofar as anyone exhibits the behaviours and dispositions that we do, they could be said to have a mind. They just can’t say where it is, just as I can’t say where glass is brittle.
I’m just looking up Ramachandran - very interesting guy!
Ramachandran is great fun, and yes, very interesting.
Good post, O_H. I admit I always get hung up when “mind” is thought of as a metaphor. Yes, it is, but… I don’t know. Something’s wrong. I believe that mind “exists” independent of my belief as to whether or not it exists. I also think mind ought to be distinguished from the physical things that we identify with mind or that we can show to correspond to mind.
I’m just talking about everyday common sense stuff here. Like, a tree exists, it doesn’t depend on my perception of it for its existence, etc. So, given that I take mind to exist in the same way (though mind is not in itself physical), what are the boundaries of “my mind”? Is it whatever we say it is - i.e. how we choose to define the word? Or is it more basic than that - i.e. the accepted meaning of the word will always and almost necessarily retain a universal meaning, the scope of which I am powerless to change. As an example, it’s hard to imagine a culture anywhere and at any time accepting that the piece of paper I write my to-do list on is part of my mind, just as a memory is. And yet the function performed is the same.
I know what you mean. Metaphors are mental allusions/connections, so how can the mental world be a metaphor?
Oops, I edited my post, in case you missed it.