Is a person more than a physical body? What is the mind? What is thought?

Answer 1

strictly no. but the human mind which is basically a product of matter evoved in the process of evolution has acquired certain peculiar extra traits which can not be easily explained away. this gives an impression that a person is more than a physical-body. but fundamentaly this is not so.
mind is an evolved matter. thought is nothing but accumulation of experiences and kinetics of it. each experience or memory is converted into a kind of chemical/electrical circuit in the brain. the thinking is nothing but the inter-action and inter-connectivity of these circuits.

Answer 2

Yes, Person is more like a physical body,

What Is The Mind Like? What Are Thoughts?
Now I will explain what the mind is and its nature.
The mind is like a rhizome. It is made up of many tubers
and is very subtle. It is neither a subatomic particle (parmanoo)
nor an atom but a stage between the two. When any situation
arises, it expresses attachment or abhorrence towards that
situation and it remains absorbed in that situation. Because of
this, a new causal-mind is created, the effect of which is brought
into fruition by vyavasthit (scientific circumstantial evidences),
and this effect manifests as ‘effective-mind’. Everyone’s mind
is different because his or her causal-mind is different. The
longer the mind remains caught up in a situation, the greater
the number of parmanoos accumulate and come together and
it is this very collection of parmanoos that creates a tuber. The
mind is a collection of tubers. When the circumstances and
timing is right in accordance to the principles of vyavasthit, the
tuber sprouts and that is what we refer to as thoughts. The
nature of the mind can be understood from the thoughts and
the kind of tubers that have been created. Thoughts can be
read. You have attachment towards pleasant thoughts and
abhorrence towards unpleasant ones and then you say you
want to conquer the mind. The mind can never be conquered,
but it can be contained through Gnan, just like water is
contained in a pot. Conquering the mind is the biggest contradiction. The Real You are sentient (chetan, with life
principle) and the mind is insentient (achetan, non-self, without
life), so how can the two be compatible? Only when the Self
does the ‘work’ of the Self and the mind does the ‘work’ of
the mind, can the problem be solved. You should maintain
awareness not to interfere with the functioning of the mind or
to become absorbed or become one with the mind.
Let me explain what these tubers of the mind are like.
Say you visit your farm in the summer and find nothing growing
in it. You will think that the farm is clean but I tell you to wait
and see what happens after it rains. After a good rain you will
see all kinds of greenery on it, all kinds of creepers everywhere.
Where did these creepers come from? Each creeper had a
rhizome under the ground, which sprouted with the first shower
of rain. Then if you uproot all the creepers, you’ll feel happy
that your farm is completely clean. I would tell you that you
could only say it is clean, if it remains free from any creepers
after three years of rain. Only then can you consider that your
farm is free of any tubers (nirgrantha). Similarly this mind is
made up of tubers, the bigger the tuber about a specific topic,
the greater the number of thoughts about that topic and the
smaller the tuber, the fewer the thoughts. For example, if you
ask a young Vanik (vegetarian sect) boy how many times he
thinks about eating meat, he would tell you that in all his
twenty years he has thought about it only a few times. This
means that his tuber of eating meat is a small one, the size of
a beetle nut. Now, if we were to ask a Muslim boy the same
question, he would tell you that he thinks about eating meat
several times a day. This means that his tuber of eating meat
is very large, the size of a large sweet potato. If you ask a Jain
child, he will tell you that the thought of eating meat never
crosses his mind, meaning he has no such tubers at all.
If you were to plot a graph about your thoughts and what
they are about, over a period of a month, a week and a day,
you would come to know the kind and the size of tubers you
have. You will have only about five or ten large ones and these
are the ones, which create a problem. There is no problem with
the smaller ones. Do you think you can do this?
I do not have any tubers within me, thus I am considered
nirgranth (without tuber). Human beings are like a piece of
wood full of knots; one cannot even make any ‘furniture’ out of
them! When these knots become excessive, they express
themselves as tumors in or on the body.
The mind is quite separate from the Self and can never
become one with it. When you have pleasant thoughts, you are
deluded to believe that it is you who is doing the thinking and
your thoughts are good. And when the thoughts are unpleasant
you say that you have these thoughts even when you do not
want them. What does that suggest? When the thoughts are
pleasant you claim to be the thinker and when they are unpleasant
you say, “What can I do?” If you were the thinker and the
thoughts were under your control then you would only think
pleasant thoughts. Nobody would entertain unpleasant thoughts.
But that does not happen, does it? Both, the pleasant and
unpleasant thoughts will come.

For More details refer http://www.dadabhagwan.org/books/english/Aptavani1.pdf

Answer 3

A person is more than his physical body because there is someone within our body that governs our activities. Mind also functions at the command of that vital thing just like our mouth, hands, and legs. Mind sorts out the information and stores the information but it's our wisdom that analyzes the information and makes the final decision about our action. Often we go against our own mind and listen to the heart. What makes us do that? There is also another thing that like keeps taking pictures like a camera or how would we see our house in Bombay while we are in New York? Our inner-self is as real as our outer self but we are too attached to the outer self that we think of ourselves as the physical body but we are a lot more than that.

Answer 4

Your questions are patently on the middle of consistent debate. There are eliminative materialists which contain Churchman who argue that technology will at last demonstrate that we at the instant are not something extra desirable than lumps of tangible count and complicated chemical reactions from which we type individuals psychology (our theory and explanation of issues with use of words which contain braveness, love, etc.). Thomas Nagel has written plenty concerning the ideas/physique undertaking besides. the place does the ideas stay? How does a persisting non-actual entity which contain ideas or 'spirit' work together with an curiously actual physique? How am i able to have confidence interior the existence of different minds? often, a stable place to start looking is in epistemology texts , even if you mustn't assume plenty interior the way of conclusive solutions IMHO. on the top of the day, many astounding philosophers who delight in the complexities of the arguments are admittedly a splash perplexed, and extra or much less shrug their shoulders. As a place to start (there is plenty to study) i might recommend analyzing Wittgenstein, Nagel, or Robert Coburn. you're able to do a seek on JSTOR for unfastened once you're a school student or possibly even by way of your community library. ideal of success!

Answer 5

have you seen working of a computer ?it will work if some of its parts are failed but once its hard disk, processor or memory will fails then it will not work but it may work when you repair the components. but you cannot even start the comp with out power supply. please compare your mind with hard disk and and memory, and heart with processor. but there is some thing in our body which is like power supply if once that supply stops, our body is dead. have you ever seen electric current? but you know how power full is that. cos we can feel it. our mind is thousand times more developed then a comp. you know the hypnotism based on the power of our mind. which is used by almost all the psychologists. there are some way like pranayam. dhyan. yoga will help you to feel the power supply of your body in other word we called it ATMA.

Answer 6

Normally is! Ask yourself what your soul is, what your heart is, too! Materialistically, heart for example, is only a muscle in our chest with it's functions. Spiritually, heart is part of our soul, charged with love!

People are not only a physical bodies, but rather a synthesis of physical body and immaterial soul.

Answer 7

"The mind is not for thinking, the mind is for receiving thought". "God dwells within you as you". Read "The Impersonal Life", by Joseph Brenner. And "Three Magic Words" by U S Andersen. Also "As A Man Thinketh". by James Allen.

Answer 8

A human is made up of the physical and spiritual self.

Answer 9

mind is the sum of the persons history

Answer 10

PHYSICAL BODY WITHOUT MIND AND THOUGHT IS COMPUTER WITHOUT PROGRAMME.