Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id UAA02875 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 4 Dec 2001 20:42:28 GMT User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022 Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2001 15:38:01 -0500 Subject: Re: Definition please From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Message-ID: <B8329E57.D166%bbenzon@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <007c01c17cf7$12e2bbe0$3b88b2d1@teddace> Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
on 12/4/01 2:08 PM, Dace at edace@earthlink.net wrote:
>>
>> Since the brain and the mind are the same thing, I would have to say that
>> their occupation of the same space is necessity not accident.
>
> They're the same thing viewed from different perspectives. Mind is brain
> from the point of view of time, while brain is mind from the point of view
> of space. It's possible to distinguish heads from tails while recognizing
> that ultimately there's only one thing-- the coin.
>
From *Beethoven's Anvil* (pp. 71-72):
Thus far we have considered the states of the brain, intentionality,
coupling and timing, all while examining the nervous system as a physical
system. We can no longer avoid the mind/body problem. I want to approach to
this problem in the manner of Gilbert Ryle¹s The Concept of Mind. Rather
than wonder how the mysterious and ineffable mind can connect with the
mysterious but concrete brain, I propose a definition:
Mind: The dynamics of the entire brain, perhaps even the entire nervous
system, including the peripheral nervous system, constitutes the mind.
The thrust of this definition is to locate mind, not in any particular
neural structure or set of structures, but in the joint product of all
current neural activity. As such the mind is, as Ryle argued, a bodily
process; in the words of Stephen Kosslyn and Olivier Koenig, ³the mind is
what the brain does.²[ ] Whether a neuron is firing at its maximum rate or
idling along and generating only an occasional spike, it is participating in
the mind. In asserting this I do not mean, of course, to imply that there is
no localization of function in the brain. There surely is. But the mind and
the brain are not the same thing, though they certainly are intimately
related, as are the dancer and the dance. The fact that the dancer is
segmented into head, neck, trunk, and limbs does not mean that the dance can
be segmented in the same way. Similarly, we should not think of the
functional specialization of brain regions as implying a similar
specialization of the mind. It is not at all clear that the mind has ³parts²
in any meaningful sense.
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