why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[bennyboy]

Woah now you've taken a step too far.

That's like saying, I see and hear a tree falling down in a forest but it won't happen if I am not there.

Besides, events are discrete whereas reality works at a more finely grained continuous scale (let's not start talking about quantum mechanics)

If I'm talking about physics in a thread about mind, you can be guaranteed that I'm talking about quantum mechanics. It is very much an interest in the quantum eraser effect, and the idea of what unresolved superpositions mean to our view of time, that make me wonder what it would mean if there were no observers.

I know that "observer" doesn't necessarily mean a conscious observer. However, it also seems to me that a conscious agent might be interestingly viewed as a kind of superposition-resolving machine. Maybe all trees are both fallen and unfallen until we discover them so.

(sorry for woo, it's 6:00am here and I just got up for some water).

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Now, addressing that directly, and on it's own merits, rather than the merits of the misapprehensions above...positing substance dualism or panpsychism doesn't actually move the chains of explanation a single inch when it comes to mind.  Stating that mind is somehow elemental is not an explanation for how we achieve that thing.  No more so than my saying "the world is made of stuff, and stuff is elemental" would be.  Perhaps more interestingly, there's nothing about the statement "mind is elemental" that is uniquely true or meaningful under panpsychism or substance dualism  but not materialism.  If mind is information processing that occurs in the brain..well...information processing is "elemental" to material monism as well.  We call it material interaction.  Does that, to you...seem to make material monism or mind "make sense".  It may not, and I'm not telling you that it does, in and of itself...but if this business about things being "elemental" is informative in that regard for panpsychism, then it ought to be equally informing in the case of material monism.

There are two pseudo-scientific responses to questions of mind which I dislike, as you know:
1) A generalized waving toward the brain, without any specific proposed mechanism
2) An evolutionary narrative without any proposed mechanism.

The issue for me is this-- how is it that the Universe, under any material configuration or process, allows for mind rather than not allowing for it? I can say, "If there were no photons which are emitted, travel through space, and received, then there would be no light." That doesn't exactly explain why there's light, but we've gotten close enough to the essence of it to really benefit from that understanding.

I'd be happy enough with "If there were no _____, there would be no consciousness." Thoreauvian has confidently asserted that the organic brain (rather than say a robot processing unit) should fill in that blank. And fair enough-- the only material system (given non-solipsism, non-simulationism etc.) that is associated with consciousness is my own brain. The next extension would be other human brains, then the most human-like mammals, and so on. Okay, but identifying systems I'm willing to accept have mind, and identifying any kind of mechanism at all which allows for mind to exist where there was none before, are very different things.

Short question: if mind is in the brain, on what level of organization does it supervene, and why?

As a sideline, did you happen to peruse the field of model control theory?

I googled it, and found a lot of hits on control theory, some including the word model, but I couldn't easily find a theory of mind. Link?