excreationist

We need to be aware of our own desires... that is pretty obvious. Perhaps you mean expressing our thoughts to others. Well that is mostly a learnt thing and it has a lot of benefits - such as technological/warfare benefits. It allows complex behaviours to be passed down and complex attacks to be coordinated. Perhaps some of our homonid cousins died out because of our better use of language and warfare advantages. I think connectedness/coherence is a very strong desire and one way of achieving this is by imitation. So copy our parent's language skills. And we might have some inbuilt language abilities.

As far as consciousness goes, here is my theory in a nutshell:
I'm not sure which of those later stages could be said to be "conscious". I think there is a difference between newborn baby style consciousness and the consciousness of an insightful philosopher.

excreationist

About imagination:
I think it is just the combination of triggered memories that satisfy a goal.

e.g. if I thought "what'a weird animal?"

My usual template is a strange colour plus a strange animal.

I thought of pink. This was probably triggered easily because I was involved with that colour a lot yesterday.

Then I thought "maybe something else" and then I thought purple. (That is basically "colour - weird - not pink") The motivation to have that thought would also have a deterministic cause I think. I was in no pressure so I thought I'd be more thorough and the line of subconscious reasoning would go "lots of time"->"be more thorough"->"is pink ok"->"yes"->"think of another colour"

Now for the animal:
cat - no
dog - no
emu - yeah
ostrich - yeah
well I'll just stop at emu... that will do. So there was pink/purple and emu. I could do either or or both. I'll do a pinky-purply emu.

I think every thought we have involves a similar process. There would be a chain of motivations that ultimately go down to fundamental emotions. (connectedness, newness, avoiding frustration...?)

In the above example I just recognized that I had things to say about imagination and since it was a habit (to do with connectedness) I thought I'd generate a response....

And this is how I think animal brains basically work:


I think that short-term memory aka working memory is what we are directly aware of. We are only aware of long-term memories or sensations if they are transferred into working memory. I think the processor of working memory it the thing which is conscious. It uses deterministic emotional responses to work out what to do... e.g. seek/repeat or avoid patterns (situations).

The processor of working memory would be a largish group of cells but without the heart, lungs, working memory, etc, it doesn't really do much... just like a CPU that is lying around on its own.

tronvillain

I would suggest that there is no "border" between the mind and the body - the "mind" is just a higher level explanation of the processes of the brain. An analogy to computer "software" and "hardware" comes in nicely at this point, though the brain is nothing like a computer. There is no "border" between hardware and software, but since we are the ones to design and construct a computer we find it easy to discern what the software is. Of course, the mind is probably closer to being analagous to a virtual machine produced by running software than to software itself.

John Page

excreationist:

Wow, comprehensive response.

No problem with imagination - that definition seems to fit what I would term the "contents of the imagination", by habit I use the word to refer to the overall faculty of the imagination.

Your diagram brings a number of important elements together. STM, so I read, does seem to rely on a specific chemical process whose effects are lost if sleep is not obtained. Capturing experience from STM is therefore an important process.

Would you care to comment on the observation that your diagram comprises two main boxes whereas brains comprise billions of cells with very little variation in type/specialization? - I forget perhaps its about six and they seem very similar.

I'm very interested in your response because the functional decomposition approach seems at odds with the brain's physical makeup which is more like I/O mapping (language, sight, smell etc.)

Cheers, John

owleye

John...

I have a major difficulty with your assigning the property of 'abstract' to minds. The property of being abstract is contrasted with the property of being concrete. Every existing body presumably is a concrete entity. No mind would be a concrete entity. A mind can only be an abstract entity, and no body can be an abstract entity.

Consider first whether this prevents their being a physical category of body. That is, no body can exist in a physical sense because it is composite. Since it is composite it is composed of parts, each of which is supposed to exist concretely and any idea that a body exists fails because its composition represents a mental category, not a physical one. (If there is such a thing as a physical category, it would have the property of being an abstract entity, which is disallowed by your theory.)

Secondly, individual minds exist in the same way individual bodies do. That is, it is not unreasonable to suppose that your mind has a concrete existence. While minds may exist in terms of a category having properties commonly held by individual minds, it should not be supposed that your mind is some abstract entity.

All this is to say that regarding the mind as an abstract entity is a category mistake.

Finally, following Brentano and Husserl, it has been forcefully argued that intentionality is the key property that minds have which physical things do not have. I believe you would benefit from learning something about phenomenology, which goes into this at great length.

owleye

John Page

tron:

Perhaps I should modify my inquiry. There are parts of the body that do not appear to contribute toward the functioning of the mind. Furthermore, there seems to be no direct evidence that the mind functions outside the body.

My rephrased question would thus be "How do I best characterize the interface between the mind and reality through either a) connection between the body that supports the phenomenon of mind and not, or b) a sensor that is an integral part of the mind that directly yields information on conditions outside the body?"

Cheers, john

tronvillain

excreatonist:
One problem with that model is that the brain does not appear to have a "processor of working memory" as a distinct physical entity. The most reasonable interpretation of your theory that I can see is that "working memory" is simply the chain reactions of neural activity in the brain.

John Page

owleye:

I can touch brains physically but minds only metaphorically. No-one has been able to show me a mind so I conclude it is either a delusory concept or the abstract phenomenon likely associated with brain + nervous system + emotional system etc.

Thank You. I did read some Husserl but you may be right, perhaps I missed some important concepts. On the other hand, I have difficulty understanding how a state of mind can represent something (through its intentionality) without that something becoming abstracted.

Would it make more sense to you if I said the contents of the mind are abstractions, rather than the mind itself?

Cheers, John

NialScorva

One thing that I've really gotten into recently in my personal exploration of philosophy is asking why I ask the questions I ask. Are you asking for a mechanical explanation of the interaction? What does an answer to this question provide to you?

In my rather strictly empiricist mind, I think that neurology is the most effecient means of exploring how the physical manifests the mental. As a metaphysical question, I view it as a meaningless question. There's the part of me that exists, that is a physically observable thing. I call this my body. There's the part of me that causes action, that initiates the chain of events that imposes my will on the world. I call this my mind. The connection?

I dunno. I don't see how the answer to that question does anything but make me feel comfortable in knowing the answer. As an alternate answer, I can accept that I don't know, and it probably won't affect me much if I did.

Or I can read more about biology.

tronvillain

John Paget:

If the dividing line is not be drawn between the brain the the rest of the body, there is probably not a distinct dividing line at all. You feed sensory information into the brain, you get behavioral information out, and the mind is composed of the processes in between. All of it reduces to neural impulses, but you don't get a comprehensible explanation that way.