Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Would you prefer to have this discussion before or -after- a few shots of whiskey?  Perhaps we could consume some hallucinogenic substances or beat our heads against a wall...and then, have this discussion.   It hardly matters whether you think brain accounts for mind, ultimately, since any context or space which does not include the situations described above is obviously -not- the context or space in which experience is had.   I think that we've done a little more than wave at the brain,  you're going to refer to at least -some- of that waving......invariably.  

I apologize. I'm a little frustrated, because I'm ready to drop the idealism for now, and to look at a physicalist explanation of mind. However, I've seen a lot of discussions that identify functions and none that identify mechanisms. Words like "information"-- how does the universe "know" when information is happening, such that a mind might be made to occur?

See, if I believe 100% that all of the human mind is in the human brain, what do I learn, really? I still do not know what about the brain it is that is experienced as conscious mind, or how multiple experiences are coordinated in a sense of self.

I've got to ask, why would it? You'd have to be -incredibly- specific.  

What do you mean by substantive coordination and visual signals (I don't think that anyone expects a sort of handoff of images), and what are we taking this to imply?  Comp mind would tell you that the visual cortex translates sensory inputs into actionable sets of variables.  Similar to how a digital camera turns the patterns of light hitting its aperture into a file.  There's an interesting division of labor apparent in that system, btw.  Such that damage to a portion causes a predictable range of decrease in function within that division while the others remain intact.  Color vision, as the easiest example...can be lost all on it's own.

In response to my idea of a kind of "screen" or virtual stage in which multiple percepts could be coordinated, you said the brain is that space. The brain is where it all comes together in a single sense of subjective self. You could pull systems offline one by one: vision, smell, sound, etc. or in parts: face recognition, parallel lines recognition, syntactic recognition, etc. but I think at the core there's the essential being-ness. But so far, I haven't heard enough specific details about how this is supposed to work in the brain.