Mind is the brain?

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Let's remember this moment.  Clearly, to you, "spark of mind" and mind are different things.  You can draw a very fine line here, and the line seems to be that mind isn't fundamental after all, spark of mind is, whatever that is.

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.

-based upon what, and what relevance is there to the table and particle comparison?

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.

Turtles all the way down as in the ability to experience qualia all the way down?

And then we want to ask why.

I can never distinguish between your why and my how.  I suspect that they're interchangeable.  

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.

I'm not sure what you mean by "it disappears", nuerons -do not- disappear under a microscope...and the table doesn't disappear either.  Resolution or scale and existence are not the same thing.  If you "zoom in" on the qm particles of the table you are still looking at the table. ....?

We know that such processing goes on in the brain, but not all of it.

We actually don't know that.  We suspect it, it's a working hypothesis, remember?  We've designed our experiments to show results if that were the case because it provides an explicable mechanism for the function of the brain.  

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.

Recall that moment above, wherein you drew such a subtle distinction between mind and spark of mind.  Guess what, what;s "going on" in your bedroom is not, at all, what I'm discussing...unless you're talking about your pc.  At which point, ofc, because I'm discussing the Comp Theory of Mind.  You most certainly -cannot- pull out an arbitrary amount of your pc and have it "still work".  The same seems to apply to our brain.  

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.

If one of those atoms was holding together the structure of the comp system then this would happen, ofc.  In the same way that if some atom was the last thing between your brain and dissolution...and it were removed, I would expect your brain to cease to be.  Whether something is a comp system is a pass/fail proposition, and a candidate comp mind has further benchmarks to cross.  It's pointless to continue referring to these increasingly specific conditions as arbitrary. Your position is that there will -never- be such a point where there is no mind? What about that bit above, where things don't have a mind, but a gazillion spark of mind? Clearly you allow for precisely what you have objected to. I simply use more descriptive (and less fanciful) terms. Your bedroom is full of material interactions, but not all material interactions are comp systems.