Mind is the brain?

[bennyboy]

The strawman is that you keep talking about physical objects and sayng they don't have mind.  I've never said they do.

????  With matter-mind as the point of conjecture it's pointless to describe any physical object as not having mind.  All have matter-mind, it's fundamental.  That's not straw, that's an inescapable consequence of the concept.  It doesn't matter whether you say they do or not, the conjecture itself demands that they -must-.

That's like saying I'm an electrical being because the atoms in my body have electrons. I wouldn't say that a rock has "a mind," though I'd say that in the QM-mind idea (and remember, it was just one of half a dozen options that I said we had to choose from), there certainly are a gazillion little sparks of elemental mind.

A QM particle is very different from a table, and I'd say a QM elemental mind would be very different from a human mind. The issue is at what level of organization the ability for something in the universe to experience qualia supervenes. I don't think there IS such a level-- I think it's turtles, all the way down.

 
Comp mind would be those portions of the architecture capable of achieving comp functions analogous to our experience.  Comp mind is only interested in the comp portion (the rest would be biology, spinal fluid, for example - as the powerplant and powerlines are infrastructure to your pc).   Nothing needs to allow for mind.  The basis of this entire conversation is that mind exists.

And then we want to ask why.

Very vaguely-  A comp mind is a system that creates representations of sense data in it's own machine language, and manipulates them.  It does logic.  It does math.  It has memory.  It can be programmed.

I get that. My problem is that while you can identify a region in space where this stuff goes on, if you examine it under a microscope, it disappears, much as a table disappears when you start zooming in on QM particles. We know that such processing goes on in the brain, but not all of it. It also goes on in my bedroom, but not all of it. But when you try to identify those very specific regions which you think do the processing stuff, you'll find that even there, you could pull an arbitrary amount of material out of the system and still have it work-- which implies that that extra material in fact wasn't an integral part of the system after all.

Your position, it seems to me, implies that at some point, you'll pull out one more atom, and you'll hit a critical mass, at which comp mind no longer exists because the system cannot carry out one or more of the functions you're describing. My position is that there will NEVER be such a point, and that there will be something like mind no matter how many particles you pull out; in other words, that saying "here is mind" and "here is not mind" is an arbitrary division, not a real one.