Philosophically might be the other way around, that the body, and external world also - is in a way part of your mind. Or rather all of our minds working together.
As philosophers have found out - going back to Berkely, Descartes and earlier - and in modern physics, scientists also - if you try to work out what the physical world would be like without any minds to perceive it - is really hard to come up with anything at all.
In Quantum Mechanics - then you have the idea of an "observer" who collapses the wave function. Without observers, then nothing is in any particular place rather than anywhere else, or in any particular state or energy level rather than any other one.
Some suggest that the universe is spontaneously "self aware" in a dim low level way - that this collapse happens automatically all the time whenever matter reaches a particular mass such as the Planck mass,
If so, our awareness might be a larger scale version of same thing.
So - our world may depend on minds to exist in a particular form and vice versa - but the mind element there could include some kind of pervasive dim awareness of this Planck Mass type.
All our scientific theories also are of course theories developed by human minds, and things we do to attempt to understand the world.
And - though it is obviously true that various neural activities go on when we think things - and that damage to our brains makes a difference to how we think, feel, etc - at the same time - is pretty clear that those activities on the physical level - are not really our "thoughts".
When you think, you are not aware of neural patterns. You think thoughts, see lights, and images and so on.
If you look at brain scans, measure electrical patterns and chemical gradients and so on- find lots of interesting physics and biology - and some of those patterns are synchronized with particular types of thought or emotion also - but nobody has ever seen a thought or an idea in that way.
So, there are major philosophical problems for those who try to identify thoughts with patterns of electricity and chemicals in the brain.
There are also major problems for those who try some kind of a duality - such as- that there is a separate "mind" and that mind and matter interact with each other - the problem then is - how do they interact at all if they are different kinds of entities? Are there "mediating particles or thoughts" that in some way partake of both mind and matter? If so what and how?
I think it is reasonable to say that we have no solution to this.
Scientists sometimes say that the mind is identical to the brain. But when you look at that philsophically - or even as a scientist, - it's hard to assign any meaning to what they say. It just seems to be a meaningless utterance. In what way are our thoughts identified with neural patterns and chemical gradients in the brain?
Nobody knows. And certainly a long way from being able to say that such and such a thought that I have corresponds to such and such a pattern in my brain - or to explain what the connection is and how my thoughts relate more exactly to what is going on in my brain.
There is some progress there - and who knows - maybe eventually we might learn to "read someone's mind" to a fair degree by measuring the brain activity. We are a long long way from being able to do that now. But - say 50 or 100 years from now?
See Christof Koch and Gary Marcus Explain the Codes Used by the Brain | MIT Technology Review (thanks to Michel Poisson for the link)
However, if something like that is every possible - that doesn't answer it philosophically - or scientifically either, not really.
Even if we knew how our brains worked so well you could read someone's thoughts by looking at the brain - still wouldn't explain why we see or think certain things when certain patterns happen in the brain.
Because what we are aware of aren't those patterns. And we do have direct experience of lots of things. So what is that experience?
If we were just like computer programs, we would behave as if we were experiencing things but wouldn't have any internal experiences or awareness.
We'd just be machines acting without any awareness. In the whole world, there would be nobody who "knows" that anything is happening. No notion of truth either - machines don't know if things are true or false - they just behave according to their construction or program.
And of course - the brain is not an isolated part of the body. Whole body is working together. When people say they feel certain things in their heart or in the pit of their stomach etc - or if you feel sensations in your hands and feet when they are touched or hurt etc - it's not really correct to say that all of that is going on in your brain. It really is going on in your body. And who is to say that you are not in some way directly aware of that part of your body - and actually feeling that sensation in your hand, or foot or whatever rather than in your brain?
Some have the idea of a tiny manikin in your brain, like a controller that is fed information from the rest of your body and uses that as a basis to "work levers" as it were to control your body. But there is no scientific basis for that idea at all.
I think myself that - at least until we know more - that the best way to understand it is simply the naive understanding - that I roughly identify with my whole body - and that I am aware of myself, my sensations in my body - and see things including other people directly. And that those are confused perceptions - sometimes I may see illusions, distortions etc - but nevertheless - that I am still relating to things directly - that it adds no extra explanatory power to try to make it into a dual experience where I only see images of things and reconstruct the world from them - because - there is no "independent" world to reconstruct in that way - that what we have - it' is - not just imagination - it is real - but is intimately connected with the way we all perceive it - possibly including a level of the universe being aware of itself in a dim but pervasive way.
That makes me a "Naive realist" - a minority view in philosophy. But one that most people have if not philosophers or not over influenced by the "brain = mind identity" idea of scientific rationalist philosophy of mind
Naïve realism
Not necessarily as final answer. But I think its 'the best we have.
I also think - that it's good to look at many different philosophical ideas and try to "inhabit" different philosophical ways of looking at the world, to try them on for size as it were, and that the other ideas also may have an element of the truth - though I don't think any of them answer it completely.
As philosophers have found out - going back to Berkely, Descartes and earlier - and in modern physics, scientists also - if you try to work out what the physical world would be like without any minds to perceive it - is really hard to come up with anything at all.
In Quantum Mechanics - then you have the idea of an "observer" who collapses the wave function. Without observers, then nothing is in any particular place rather than anywhere else, or in any particular state or energy level rather than any other one.
Some suggest that the universe is spontaneously "self aware" in a dim low level way - that this collapse happens automatically all the time whenever matter reaches a particular mass such as the Planck mass,
If so, our awareness might be a larger scale version of same thing.
So - our world may depend on minds to exist in a particular form and vice versa - but the mind element there could include some kind of pervasive dim awareness of this Planck Mass type.
All our scientific theories also are of course theories developed by human minds, and things we do to attempt to understand the world.
And - though it is obviously true that various neural activities go on when we think things - and that damage to our brains makes a difference to how we think, feel, etc - at the same time - is pretty clear that those activities on the physical level - are not really our "thoughts".
When you think, you are not aware of neural patterns. You think thoughts, see lights, and images and so on.
If you look at brain scans, measure electrical patterns and chemical gradients and so on- find lots of interesting physics and biology - and some of those patterns are synchronized with particular types of thought or emotion also - but nobody has ever seen a thought or an idea in that way.
So, there are major philosophical problems for those who try to identify thoughts with patterns of electricity and chemicals in the brain.
There are also major problems for those who try some kind of a duality - such as- that there is a separate "mind" and that mind and matter interact with each other - the problem then is - how do they interact at all if they are different kinds of entities? Are there "mediating particles or thoughts" that in some way partake of both mind and matter? If so what and how?
I think it is reasonable to say that we have no solution to this.
Scientists sometimes say that the mind is identical to the brain. But when you look at that philsophically - or even as a scientist, - it's hard to assign any meaning to what they say. It just seems to be a meaningless utterance. In what way are our thoughts identified with neural patterns and chemical gradients in the brain?
Nobody knows. And certainly a long way from being able to say that such and such a thought that I have corresponds to such and such a pattern in my brain - or to explain what the connection is and how my thoughts relate more exactly to what is going on in my brain.
There is some progress there - and who knows - maybe eventually we might learn to "read someone's mind" to a fair degree by measuring the brain activity. We are a long long way from being able to do that now. But - say 50 or 100 years from now?
See Christof Koch and Gary Marcus Explain the Codes Used by the Brain | MIT Technology Review (thanks to Michel Poisson for the link)
However, if something like that is every possible - that doesn't answer it philosophically - or scientifically either, not really.
Even if we knew how our brains worked so well you could read someone's thoughts by looking at the brain - still wouldn't explain why we see or think certain things when certain patterns happen in the brain.
Because what we are aware of aren't those patterns. And we do have direct experience of lots of things. So what is that experience?
If we were just like computer programs, we would behave as if we were experiencing things but wouldn't have any internal experiences or awareness.
We'd just be machines acting without any awareness. In the whole world, there would be nobody who "knows" that anything is happening. No notion of truth either - machines don't know if things are true or false - they just behave according to their construction or program.
And of course - the brain is not an isolated part of the body. Whole body is working together. When people say they feel certain things in their heart or in the pit of their stomach etc - or if you feel sensations in your hands and feet when they are touched or hurt etc - it's not really correct to say that all of that is going on in your brain. It really is going on in your body. And who is to say that you are not in some way directly aware of that part of your body - and actually feeling that sensation in your hand, or foot or whatever rather than in your brain?
Some have the idea of a tiny manikin in your brain, like a controller that is fed information from the rest of your body and uses that as a basis to "work levers" as it were to control your body. But there is no scientific basis for that idea at all.
I think myself that - at least until we know more - that the best way to understand it is simply the naive understanding - that I roughly identify with my whole body - and that I am aware of myself, my sensations in my body - and see things including other people directly. And that those are confused perceptions - sometimes I may see illusions, distortions etc - but nevertheless - that I am still relating to things directly - that it adds no extra explanatory power to try to make it into a dual experience where I only see images of things and reconstruct the world from them - because - there is no "independent" world to reconstruct in that way - that what we have - it' is - not just imagination - it is real - but is intimately connected with the way we all perceive it - possibly including a level of the universe being aware of itself in a dim but pervasive way.
That makes me a "Naive realist" - a minority view in philosophy. But one that most people have if not philosophers or not over influenced by the "brain = mind identity" idea of scientific rationalist philosophy of mind
Naïve realism
Not necessarily as final answer. But I think its 'the best we have.
I also think - that it's good to look at many different philosophical ideas and try to "inhabit" different philosophical ways of looking at the world, to try them on for size as it were, and that the other ideas also may have an element of the truth - though I don't think any of them answer it completely.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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