Mind is the brain?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Not only have I not ignored this, I have even suggested a practical experiment which we might do to bridge the gap between the mysterious nature of subjective mind involving 2 brains and an electric mechanism.

... ignoring all the time that you would still be relying upon the "mysterious nature of the subjective mind."

If it pleases you to think that you've been watching me masturbate, then that's on you.

I'm unsure why you think it might please me. It's actually a little embarrassing; I feel bad for you.

I've pretty clearly, and pretty often, said that my interest in this thread is talking about how to establish on what scale of function in the brain mind ultimately supervenes: something at the quantum or chemical level, something at the neural level, something at the whole-brain level, etc.

I'd be willing to bet that something as complex as mental activity takes into account many different levels of processing, and trying to assign it to one arena of activity (if you'll pardon the clunky term) is probably misguided.

I'd want to know also if say Google can or could be thought of as a mind, and what the implications would be for a theory of qualia: does Google "experience" the world, given that it has billions of videos and pictures, and that it can process them to output behaviors (for example by targeting ads)?

Why don't you ask it? Surely, if Google had an extant thought process it could comprehend your question. And if it gave an answer absent that thought process, then that would imply that it's programmers anticipated bored folks surfing the internet for philosophical "conundrums".

As for who I am talking to, and why?  I've in fact addressed this several times.  I've said that even if I suspected an android wasn't actually able to experience qualia, I would interact with it socially anyway.  I might even establish an emotional attachment to it, because of my nature as a human being.  And that is I we see other people as mindful-- not because it can be established to be true, but because it makes for a more enriched experience in living life.  So a gnostic position isn't necessary for me to act as though someone/something has mind.

Does this look like an android?





"But -- but -- it could have been a robot that someone down in Texas built in order to fool the likes of me." (Pssst -- the android was BB, the cat introducing me. He's an old, grey-haired android).

No, you're talking to a real live human being. That's who you're talking to: me. If you cannot tell that I'm not an android, well, perhaps you should study people more and philosophy less?

It IS necessary, however, if I want a sufficiently robust theory of mind to start looking at non-animal systems in the universe and establish whether they are likely to experience or not.

Where would that mind reside, do you think? How might it operate absent living processes? What energy transfer would fuel the process?