The Mind and the Brain

[paladinoflunaria]

A recent question: Does the mind exist independently of the brain? What exactly is the mind? Is the mind material, does it have mass? Anyone know of some scientific sources for finding the answer to this question? Just wondering what the INTP consensus was.

[Strephonade]

The mind does not exist without the brain, but it transcends those physical components from which it arises.

[flan2dave]

I suppose I can answer from a physics point of view. When one looks really close at matter, it becomes a mystery whether or not that matter really exists, however there laws, patterns, and processes that can be identified nonetheless. I think you can ask just as well: is the brain material? Well, yes and no. Is the mind material? Yes and no. The mind represents what the brain is doing, it's an abstract notion. Mass itself could be seen as a result of a process, so you'll ask again what is the deeper material. There could no such thing as material in the universe, so really, how can you say the mind is any less tangible than the brain? They are tangible in different ways. We wouldn't describe thoughts in terms of mass, let's suppose that statement doesn't make sense. But does it need to for thought to exist? Not at all.

[paladinoflunaria]

flan2dave wrote:

The mind represents what the brain is doing

I'm not sure I understand that.

I agree with the physics point-of-view.

flan2dave also wrote:

We wouldn't describe thoughts in terms of mass

Isn't the mind just a collection of thoughts? Perhaps it is the energy input for the brain.

What does everyone think about artificial intelligence?

[jittus rye]

I always thought the mind was the actually molecules of chemical messengers and electrical impulses taking place. Molecules have matter, but electricity does not. However, the mind is just another form of measure that your brain is doing.

-For example. Although I became distracted and forgot what I was originally thinking about, I would have to say that the actually thought is simply the perceptions that the body is taking in being put to use. The mind works just like a computer. Memories stored on hard disk, the cpu being the frontal lobe, and the ram connecting the two hemispheres. I guess it is duel processing. (not really at all, but it sounds fitting, doesn't it?) The mind is amazing, I think we are a ways off from coming up with a competitive AI. I would think it would have to involve a program type device that programs itself based on input and experience, because that's what the mind does. We all just start off with different programs.

[Jkrs]

To use the computer analogy, what's software without hardware to store & run it on?

I suppose one could define a mind as anything which isn't possible to deduce directly from the state of the brain. At a guess, having an empty stomach and the neural activity associated with that state isn't quite the same as being aware that you're hungry.
[Edit: Now I recall the descriptive I wanted. 'Emergent system'.]


AI still has a ways to go, and I'm inclined to think more of the advances will have to do with learning algorithms & self-modifying code (and possibly quantum computing) than processing power. The human brain can run a large number of processes in parallel and somewhat isolated from one another, which probably doesn't leave much raw power for each individual thread.

[KentOhio]

What is mind? Only matter. What is matter? Nevermind.
-Homer Simpson

[Johnny]

A recent question:
Does the mind exist independently of the brain?
What exactly is the mind?
Is the mind material, does it have mass?
Anyone know of some scientific sources for finding the answer to this question?
There does seem to be a correlation between the brain and the mind, doesn't there? I am asked to think if something, and someone measures electrical impulses from within my brain to complement this activity.

I haven't asked anyone who doesn't display this correlation and received any responses to confirm or deny anything here, so we may at least be able to say that living people cannot possess a mind without a brain. :nerd:

*edit: oops, had to correct grammar errors :D

[CosmicDust]

I consider the mind to be "real" and tangible. I think of it as a dynamical energy pattern, whose processes cannot be completely traced from an outside perspective because (a) it's complicated like the weather and (b) it involves things in wild quantum states which often have indistinct positions, momenta, energies, etc. The mass of the mind probably couldn't be calculated, as the mind's energy would probably blend in/overlap with energy associated with the brain and nervous system that doesn't seem to be part of the process of the mind.

It doesn't make sense for a nonphysical thing to arise from a physical cause, and by physical I mean mass, energy, space, time, and whatever else is involved in physical equations, perhaps whatever other forms the stuff of the Universe can take as well. I think of mass, energy, space, and time as probably being the same thing at some level since they can influence each other - or at least, mass-energy can alter space-time through relativity effects.

I recently read a book called "The Mind and the Brain" by Schwartz and Begley. Browse psychology sections in book stores and you're likely to find some interesting brain reads. That one was my most recent, and helped to refine some of my ideas on the issue.

[Johnny]

It doesn't make sense for a nonphysical thing to arise from a physical cause, and by physical I mean mass, energy, space, time, and whatever else is involved in physical equations, perhaps whatever other forms the stuff of the Universe can take as well. I think of mass, energy, space, and time as probably being the same thing at some level since they can influence each other - or at least, mass-energy can alter space-time through relativity effects.

This is an interesting comment, to pose that a physical equation is truly a physical thing that we have constructed with our minds to represent an experience or observation. When we talk of physical causes, might as well acknowledge somehow that we haven't figured out yet how to talk about such things without us getting in the way (e.g., our thoughts, hopes, dreams, beliefs, speculation)... :D

[antireconciler]

When we talk of physical causes, might as well acknowledge somehow that we haven't figured out yet how to talk about such things without us getting in the way (e.g., our thoughts, hopes, dreams, beliefs, speculation)... :D

You mean our minds, right? When the mind looks at itself does it see itself looking at itself looking at itself looking at itself ... ?

Pardon the off topic comment, but I've always wanted to take a laser pointer into a bathroom with big mirrors that face each other and see how many reflections I could cram in there before the beam scattered too much to be visible from the scattering.

Anyway, I think the "mind" is a manefestation of the ego, a survival mechanism, and that the ego is a physical system in the brain somewhere. That's hardly scientific, though. I think the most fascinating related question is "what is consciousness?" My mind performs an illegal operation and has to shutdown when I ask that, and I end up conscious, not thinking. It's similar to "who am I?" Are there answers to such questions?

Edit: I think the ego, as a system, generator of the mind, interacts heavily with our emotional center. Our thoughts and actions are always tied to our emotions.

[Melody]

The nervous system (including the brain) is a neural network. Remember Terminator 2? "My CPU is a neural net processa." NN processors have been available for a long time. They are not close at all to the human brain. yet.

do u know what reads your snail mail adresses? a neural network.

do u know how much dna is required for the brain? *laughs* intelligence is trivial for nature would not have it any other way. i have no doubt there will be machines much more intelligent than us in the future.

i recommend a badass book called "The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262011972/ref=lpr_g_1/102-1450112-3168946?v=glance&s=books

might set you back in the bread but its a good just-before-falling-asleep read

[Johnny]

You mean our minds, right? When the mind looks at itself does it see itself looking at itself looking at itself looking at itself ...

I mean everything being "real and tangible" as CosmicDust posted. Not that I necessarily agree without reservation, but it is still an interesting idea.

I like your Yoga instructor offering and question, by the way. :D

[giftedmadness@hotmail.com]

The mind is the voice of the soul. In this world, the soul can't express itself without a functioning brain. The brain is the link between the spiritual and the material. It's like an adapter. No brain - no chance for the soul to express itself in this world. If you get rid of the soul, you have animals struggling for survival. These are all new thoughts for me, be kind.

[paladinoflunaria]

giftedmadness wrote:

The mind is the voice of the soul.

I don't agree with the soul concept, but what I'm going for is of definite spiritual importance.

I'm thinking of the mind as the electricity that powers the computer that is the brain. I'm not sure if that is provable.

[Melody]

I do not know if you have heard of functions such as the Fourier and Laplace transforms or wavelets, but they deal with converting a function from one domain to another. For example:

time vs amplitude

can be converted to

frequency vs (something - forgot what)

In other words, two functions can be used to represent the same input-output system. In a particular analytic perspective, it may be true that the mind powers the brain just as much as it is true in another analytic perspective that the brain is nothing more than a bunch of neural networks.

[flan2dave]

I recently read a book called "The Mind and the Brain" by Schwartz and Begley.

Is the author John Schwartz, the string theorist?

[Johnny]

We cannot get out of the way because we are an active part of nature and are interacting with everything we observe. At the quantum level, any interventions we make affect the dynamics of the system...

What was most interesting to me here regarding this way of thinking was that there could not be speculation of a world that does not include us...but I may now be mistaken here.

I understand Descartes to have envisioned that we can know of a world that exists independently of us, and the problems in this way of thinking (one important one being: if we are separate then what can we know about the world at all?) brought Kant to envision two separate worlds - one that both depends on us for existence and for which we can only come to know anything about, and a second world that we are compelled to have exist but for which we can know nothing. Jung borrows on Kant's dualistic idea some in developing his own architecture for psychology (e.g., Archetypes/archetypal images, self/ego), but such an idea has its flaws too, especially in making objective knowledge difficult to understand clearly and grasp pragmatically. :nerd:

But here I thought perhaps you were offering something that attempts to dispel that second world altogether - that there is one world, all of us are in it, and that's all. What we see is truly what is.

You may be making this all perfectly clear in the terms you use, but my ignorance is holding me back on some meanings. Are you are clarifying through the Uncertainty Principle (or perhaps some other mechanism) that things existing independently of us remain, at least, for our speculation?

*edit: woah, that's weird. I'm responding to the post below...:huh: :D

[Birdsnest]

You might be talking about concious/mind.

Some little amoeba from 10 million years ago is to be appreciated, and thanked because without it, we wouldnt have present conciousness. So we are really connected to the past through concious existance.

[Johnny]

Some little amoeba from 10 million years ago is to be appreciated, and thanked because without it, we wouldnt have present conciousness.

I will recognize that little amoeba with you, Birdsnest. :cheers:

...and to see if we inadvertently continue to push CosmicDust's post forward...:lol:

[CosmicDust]

It's Jeffrey Schwartz, the OCD doctor.

My dang post didn't go through last night...I was commenting on Johnny's comment that we seem to get in the way. We cannot get out of the way because we are an active part of nature and are interacting with everything we observe. At the quantum level, any interventions we make affect the dynamics of the system - we can't learn about nature without fucking with it in the process. We seek to understand a system, and we think in terms of measurables like momentum, so we build an apparatus that imposes these measurables onto things. We tweak to get a specific momentum reading at the expense of blurring position (Uncertainty Principle) and altering the object from its original state (I think of these original states as "wild" quantum states) where "position" and "momentum" type properties were both moderately diffuse.

[CosmicDust]

[quote=CosmicDust]But here I thought perhaps you were offering something that attempts to dispel that second world altogether - that there is one world, all of us are in it, and that's all. What we see is truly what is.

You may be making this all perfectly clear in the terms you use, but my ignorance is holding me back on some meanings. Are you are clarifying through the Uncertainty Principle (or perhaps some other mechanism) that things existing independently of us remain, at least, for our speculation?

The Uncertainty Principle, to me, says that our methods of inquiry and observation limit what we can directly observe thanks to the way quantum states work, which is that certain paired macroscopic physical quantities cannot both be well-defined for a quantum entity - position and momentum being the famous pair. (There's another one, like energy and some sort of time quantity, but I forget exactly.) The natural states of quantum things just do not have these neat definitions we use to trace the macroscopic world, and therefore we cannot trace the quantum world in the same way as the macroscopic world.

What we see is, I think, a subset of what is - it's our interaction with the other things that are, which is part of this world in itself. Our interaction can only allow us to learn certain things, and in certain ways. I do indeed believe it's all just one world.

[Melody]

Imagine a software simulation running on a computer. The simulation has intelligent beings. If they study their own world, willl they ever learn of the "real" world, ours? How would they be able to even know that their world is run by a machine? This is similar to the above-mentioned Descartes observation thingie. The beings can take measurments, but all they have to work with is what the simulation gives them. At most, they might figure out some things about the computer system, but what about the silicon composing the computer? What about the electricity that powers it? These are disjoint from what they can observe because they are run by a computer and this computer could just as easily be hard silicon as a bunch of wooden sticks and gears like Babbage would have it.

[CosmicDust]

They could at least discover some features of the algorithms of the program, their "natural laws." They might also speculate about a larger organizing principle that unites the laws and entities they know of...they might not think of a silicon chip per se, but they would intuit something unseen possibly accounting for the regularities they find within the world they see. That would be like their theology and/or superstring theories.

[Johnny]

What we see is, I think, a subset of what is - it's our interaction with the other things that are, which is part of this world in itself. Our interaction can only allow us to learn certain things, and in certain ways. I do indeed believe it's all just one world.

O.K., now I think I understand where you're coming from. :D

[Hazy]

What isn't the mind? There's no not-mind you can could compare it to...

It's like 'What created everything...the 'what' would be a part of the everything by definition, otherwise it wouldn't be everything.

[Melody]

They could at least discover some features of the algorithms of the program, their "natural laws." They might also speculate about a larger organizing principle that unites the laws and entities they know of...they might not think of a silicon chip per se, but they would intuit something unseen possibly accounting for the regularities they find within the world they see. That would be like their theology and/or superstring theories.

A! repeaterizing what I said! repeat repete pete

pete ^.^

[Melody]

haha sorry, you know when you say something like:

A B C

and then someone tells you,

But, you forgot B!

?

[Melody]

argablargh now i feel guilty

must run away

[monty python]
run away
run away

[CosmicDust]

Nothing to feel guilty about. I didn't realize just how stupid my post was...now that I look at it again, I now notice that you covered all of it in your post completely. All I did was reword it with different direct naming references to our own science and philosophy processes.

[Melody]

:hello:

*coughs up a guilty hair ball*

[GraviTass]

Perhaps Mind is the Fifth and most important force operating in our universe - more important than Gravity , Electromagnetism , Weak and Strong forces . So many implications if true. But first a bite to eat ... (LOL)