Mind v Brain?
09Jan. 09
After reading the post Duelling with dualism, I was reminded of an essay I wrote a while back — so I thought I’d post it. It’s 10 pages and has end notes, so I’ve just posted the introduction and conclusion here. If it tickles your fancy, hit the link to read it in it’s entirety. (Here’s the entire thing @ Scribd: Is there a difference between the mind and the brain?)
Is There a Difference Between the Mind and Brain?
Introduction:
Scientific knowledge suggests that the world is inanimate, purposeless, made up of material things which operate on a cause and effect basis; yet the mental world seems to involve consciousness, planning, desire etc. It would seem paradoxical that one world is the product of another. Yet this is the conclusion we are faced with if we are to make any sense of the evidence at hand and resolve one of the major philosophical questions of all time. “Do the electronic processes of the brain ‘create’ or ‘give rise to’ the mind; or is it that the electronic processes are the mind?” The ratiocination of this question is essentially philosophical, but by necessity, it is grounded in the world of empirical science.
The brain is the organ of soft nervous tissue which fills the cranium of humans and other vertebrates. The mind, on the other hand, is the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences in it; it is the faculty of consciousness and thought. With these typical definitions for the brain and mind, how can the brain be the mind at all? I will argue that the mind is an ‘emergent property’ of the brain. Moreover, the mind comes after the brain – mental events are the subjective experiences of the physical events which occur in our brains. As a consequence, the mind is nothing more than the feeling of ‘being me now’.
Conclusion:
Philosophical discourse is about meaning and justification, “What are you saying?” and “How do you know that?” Adhering to this approach, my argument has been that the electronic processes of the brain give rise to the mind – the experience of ‘being me’ (or ‘being you’) at this point in time. We know this, as there most certainly is a first person experience of existence, even if it can only be ascertained by Descartes famous maxim – cogito ergo sum. But we also know that Descartes was wrong with respects to his ontology of mind and brain. Unlike Descartes, we aren’t being mystical about it, we can say that physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experiences we call our mind. But the answer cannot be that the electronic processes in the brain are the mind; because if we accept Dennett’s criteria for what makes a good ‘theory of mind’ – that it should be able to explain our various phenom (which seems to be a valid criteria) – then this answer (as previously argued) is evidently lacking.
Consciousness is either generated by brain activity, or, is brain activity. In this sense experimental evidence doesn’t favour one hypothesis over the other. But at the very least it does favour the conclusion that the brain comes before the mind. In other words, the processes of the brain give rise to the mind, such that the brain ‘acts’ and the mind ‘observes’. If we consider the anecdotal evidence (and certainly there is a lot of it), that every single conscious human being ever asked has some sort of mental awareness, then we are forced to conclude that the mind is simply the macro-level of explanation – it is an emergent property. For these reasons, as a concept, it has a definite value; but of more importance is the fact that as an experience, it is undeniable.
Tags: Brain, Consciousness, materialism, mind
