What is a mind?

Answer 1

The human consciousness that originates in the brain and is manifested especially in thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, and imagination.

Answer 2

It's just a word, created in an attempt to define something that I think is still undefinable, although that said, I do think the word has meanings that are understandable by others because we share a form of collective unconscious a la Carl Jung.
Besides humanity has a tendency to want to define things.
All sorts of other words like thought, reason, consciousness sub conscious etc came into being for the same reason.
And, although they are only words, they do attempt however poorly to facilitate/attune other people to be able to share in the human experience/awareness which incidentally, I think is only partially a conscious process.
As far as I know, when it was coined it was an attempt to define an area within the skull where supposedly the sum of what we are 'lived'. It was an ephemeral virtual space linked to awareness, consciousness and spirituality.
The word mind I think has a great many connotations/meanings but in the main I think it is sadly misused
I will put money on that no one knows, the jury's out for lunch and it's gonna be a long lunch, a few thousand years at least.

Answer 3

A collection of data that a person has experienced during his/her lifetime and stored, including language interpretation and communication skills. Every experience imaginable even down to boiling an egg. You base decisions on your experiences and so your thoughts are part derived from your experiences and your solutions. The sum often of many experiences creates a new experience. This is my interpretation. The problem comes in that everyone as I understand it is unique and has a sense of self. They can interact with other 'minds' which can then add new variables and shape decisions on the new experience, not just the ones in memory. If all you have ever had is bad experiences, then your solutions will be based on bad experiences IMHO. Therefore sometimes you have to break the cycle to get good experiences from outside sources (ie other minds) or you can dwell in the fictious mumbo-jumbo that is Eastenders and Coronation Chocolate etc.

If our decisions all come from what we have experienced before and what we experience from interaction with other minds (and by watching what Dot in Eastenders did), of which you then sieve through, ie dreaming, are we really free? If you have influences around you that can keep you in that mind set are we really free. We may have an interpretation of self and an understanding of self, but that doesn't mean we are self. It could be a conclusion of deductions that give us an interpretation of identity. If you can be given ideas via the media to think about things in a set way (ie Eastenders) and then you believe these deductions to be your own idea because you subconsciously filed and interpreted and based new experiences on them are we really free? To give an example Dot doing a collection and then getting mugged. If you accept that is the reality, that is the reality you create; ie noone will do a collection because they've now accepted and decided they'll be mugged...that then is then the reality. Had the said person not watched that exciting episode of Eastenders, they would be missing that experience and so their decisions would be based on their own experiences not on a fictious rubbish. This is one easy way to be manipulated. Same goes for the News etc...

Finally I don't believe people should study Psychology. Noone is ever right in psychology. Psychology is a debate. Not for someone to tell you you are right or wrong and give you a nice piece of paper to state you've passed the understanding as you are wanted to understand it or worse, learn what a deep and dark mind you've got for profiling.

The biggest fear IMHO is death. No fear of death and you cannot be manipulated. It happens so why should it matter when it happens?

Answer 4

When academics talk about consciousness they use the word 'qualia' to define our subjective experience of what we perceive. This is to distinguish them from the brain processes involved and, as yet no one has been able to give a fully satisfactory explanation as to why we need a conscious awareness of, for example, a colour, rather than processing information without the mental images etc that go with it. It has been suggested that mind is an emergent property of the brain in the same sense as heat is an emergent property of an engine - not what its designed for but a side effect of its functional processes. The quality of 'mind' in the sense of intangible subjective experiences is known as the 'hard problem of consciousness'. The concept itself is probably a result of the Cartesian mind-body distinction and has evolved from the older concept of the soul. The psyche is perhaps an intermediary concept somewhere between the two (although this is the oldest of the three dating back to ancient Greece). The fact that those three ideas exist separately to describe the non-physical elements of self or 'I' demonstrates how difficult it is to put our finger on exactly what this subjective sense of self is and which elements constitute self. Each definition seems to have a little less that could be considered unscientific about it so that, while the soul can be defined as our spirit or part of God or whatever, mind is generally seen to just be the experience of brain function. The reductionism that science has progressively applied to the individual 'I' has led some to think it out of existence (e.g. Daniel Dennett, who suggests that there is no such thing as the mind and the Gestaltists in psychology argue that there is no such thing as a unified Self); something of a paradoxical thing to do! I think the biggest problem that scientists have with the mind is that they can see no good reason for its existence and this is a fairly modern problem borne out of a secular society since, up until about 100 years ago, it would have been seen by most thinkers as both God-given and serving the purpose of experiencing the Divine. Since mind is probably the part of man which most closely correlates with what the individual sees as him or her Self, we are faced with the interesting problem of thinking ourselves out of existence - if there is a God He must find this result of our attempts to cope without belief in Him quite funny!

Answer 5

If you are studying Psychology, your question is an excellent basis for a thesis. Look at the common phraseology that people use - "I am in two minds about ...", "I've got something on my mind", "That was a mindless thing to do", "Do you mind?", I cannot mind how you could eat that", "What's on your mind...", "Never mind ..." - there are plenty more examples, and it would be fun too researching this!

Answer 6

the human mind is the thoughts and thought processes of a person . the mind is a place of storage of your life
the mind is what has been learned , forgotten , remembered,
loved, felt. and the place where the responses to situations are tested often long before they ever come into life. it is the testing grounds of emotion. reason and belief .
the mind is interconnected with the soul the mind is the only part of you that knows your soul.

Answer 7

The collective knowledge of every cell in your body, the tripartite experience which is subconscious, conscious and supraconscious, or body, mind, spirit, or past, present, future, or maiden mother, crone, or father, son and holy ghost.....all is my at one level

Answer 8

Do you want our personal definition of "mind" or do u just want a standard dictionary's definition?

Answer 9

An excellent question I know we are much closer to the real answers now that computers are invented. So what is a computer is yours to answer now.

Answer 10

mind your business