What is the Mind?

Question

10 points for your best philosophical answer!

Answer 1

It's you. The magical, intricate, complex, fascinating part of you that reasons, that thinks & feels, that dreams & creates. The part of you that is. The part that matters most, for without it you have nothing. Not the brain, though that's where it resides, not the physical or tangible, but just you. Your spirit. Your soul. More important than the body, it will live on in some form when the body drops away. The mind can leave the body even now, you can learn to astral project. The mind can overcome anything (mind over matter). It is powerful & it does what we tell it. So it's important to feed it positive rather than negative things. They become our reality.

Answer 2

Some mystics have described that the mind is likened to a coconut, it has an outward shell we call the conscious. It has the larger inner segment which we often call the subconscious.
What the conscious part of the mind achieves is the mechanics of the personality. IE ego, which in turn is forged from environmental experiences and to a degree genes.
Therefore the conscious is not the true essence of mind we are looking for, since it is dependant upon the body for its perception of reality.
yet the subconscious, is where the fountain of intuition and creativity arise from. This is the nucleus of mind, yet still tainted by memories of the five senses.
The Sixth sense is the purest consciousness that exists and is the hallmark of mind essense.
Unlike the beliefs of clairvoyants, the sixth sense is not a supernatural ability, but the very natural skill of insight attained my mental techniques such as meditation or contemplation, or
when ever the mind is calm, a purer sense of reality is achieved. This is what is described as mind essense.

Answer 3

We normally know the mind by intellectual, creative, spiritual and cognitive aspects of our personality. These are the characteristics of our mind that come to be know through characteristics that we exhibit in dealing with the matters of our world. The question is what brought all these aspects together to compose ourselves as we essentially are? We could have been merely physical beings, or entirely spiritual alongside being intelligent and dexterous. Our intellect is loaded with questions that can only intuitively be perceived. This consideration takes us beyond the domains of what can be explained fully rationally.

The creation is a mystery. Even when we are most philosophical we cannot explain or understand where have we come from? Or, what is the ultimate purpose behind our creation? We believe in creation because it is what we know we are a part of, we cannot be outside creation. We understand that there is a purpose to our creation as it is to everything we experience in the world. Until we are able to comprehend the ultimate purpose behind our own creation, we cannot understand the construct of our own mind. We are living in our mind, and mind is not something we have. What we have is various aspects of the mind that we use to perform the functions of our life.

Now, if I transcend and leave the philosophical consideration behind then I can say that we are an expression of divine love and intelligence. There is some supreme being who realised love and intelligence in the form of human beings. Upon our creation we, first of all, wondered and tried to look back where we were before, as we do even today, but as we did just that we saw a new strange and unknown world all around us, as we see it today. This strange, new and enchanting world that we see is our mind.

The mind is our world that is between our origin and us. It is like a sphere is light round a candle – ever spreading, ever searching. We must focus our mind and keep searching. If we are realisation of divine love then we need to realise what is in our mind – the divine, the best. We need to contemplate things of eternal significance that we will recognise eventually. We are, as if we are displaced from the state of some eternal bliss and tranquillity – the stillness behind the thoughts in our mind, into a world that requires us to have projective aspects of our mind – noisy, active and thinking al the time.

Answer 4

I've never liked the electrochemical theory, but I've also never liked the humonculous hanging over the electrochemical processes theory either.

Consider, people can be completely uconscious and insensate and their eletrochemical processes still continue. And here, I'm not talking about simple sleep, because dreams could be argued to be the corallary activity. I am thinking more along the lines of complete anasthesia, where the electrochemical responses still occur, but yet any activity we regard as "mental" does not take place at all.

If the electrochemical responses "were" consciousness, I do not see how all thoughts and mental activity could ever stop while the electrochemical processes were still occuring.

I think that the electrochemical responses play a small part in consciousness and mental activity, but I do not think that they determine the whole.

Consider, do you really think that noriphinephrine, seretonin, and dopamine interactions would by themselves, ever be able to contemplate the philosophy inherent in its very nature?

Answer 5

Its interesting isn't it, how different and rich the answers are. I feel like they've all said a lot of things that i wanted to, so i'll try and go a bit more in depth for you.

When we try and establish what a mind is, we tend to look to places, where none exists as a first port of call, and i guess we're talking a little about consciousness here...but basically Babies and Monkeys can recognise themselves in a mirror, and this tells us they have a mind, that they see themselves as subjects in their environment. No other animal can do this, so we say that awareness at that level is resigned to primates and humans. However there are some humans and primates that lack the ability to show to us as researchers, that they know they exist, this can be called Autism as an example in humans. Autism, isn't understood, in fact, the whole approach to 'understanding medical model labels' isn't really aimed at understanding, and as a result Autism cannot be tested, aside from the few savant skilled autistic people, the vast majority of Autism is misunderstood.

Saying that, there are 3 core theories to try and get at the central defict in autism and they all relate to the mind.

The first Central Cohernence
The 2nd is Theory of Mind
and the third Esecutive Dysfunction

they are all a bit hard to summarise, and actually all quite negative and oppressive in their reach but one says the autistic mind is unable to centralise the information coming in that would usually help us to act appropriately and read people's emotions correctly etc....that that function is distorted

the other is that it is the inability of the child with autism to put himself in other peopls's shoes in his or her mind, to understand that other people exist with different needs and priorities to themselves that is the central problem with Autism...we all have a theory of our mind as opposed to someone elses, these kids don't

and the last, i never quite understood because i think it stinks, is that the decision making, executive function in the mind of an person with autism is dysfunctional and unable to respond to the needs to the lived experience of that person.

Not sure if this is helping you but i am going somewhere with this. So if you look at those things, a mind can be seen as a function of a greater whole, preocessing information to help the host guide their action and behaviour in a dynamic with other people's states of minds, emotions and needs. But to say someone with Autism doesn't have a mind is quite clearly absurd and perhaps highlights the limits of our approach.

Mind over matter!

Answer 6

I have no clue as to any academic or accepted definition of mind. Here is what I think as a layman....

Mind is the metaphysical aspect of the physical brain which gets influnced and moulded by incoming impulses to the brain and in turn, influences and moulds the outgoing impulses from the brain. Over a period of time, the mind acquires a personality and the rate of inward moulding reduces considerably and outward moulding becomes more consistent and strong. This is why adults and wise people have a mind of their own.

Answer 7

Sophia got it!
The mind is the construct that our internal processes use to integrate the massive amounts of data we take in on a daily basis. It can be orderly and effective, or disorderly and useless, but it is still just a process inside our skullbones.
Cheers.

Answer 8

Perhaps it's what keeps our soul and or spirit, connected in the body, our inner person. Have you heard of out of body experiences? Some people have these O.B.E'S and come back with evidence of things they've seen, which have later been found to be true.

Answer 9

The internally\subjectivly observable reflections of the electro-chemical processes of the body.

Answer 10

It is analogous to an electronic keyboard that has access to the neural network we call the brain.