Mind is the brain?

[bennyboy]

That being said, there has been a lot of very interesting science going on around mind in the last 20 years, so I certainly don't want you guys to think I don't value that.  The problem I have is when it comes to assertions about exactly what causes mind and why-- I don't find any current views, physical or otherwise, very convincing.

I think the consensus that the mind is the brain is more of a pragmatic result than a theoretical one.  We assign the identity because for the most part it works as an explanation of the phenomenon, including its evolution, whereas most other theories are non-starters.  It doesn't mean we couldn't be wrong, but I think you hold the mind-brain paradigm to an unusually high standard of evidence.  Things like the closure of induction and the philosophical understanding of the link between cause and effect pose similarly insurmountable hurdles, yet I don't think you place those problems in the same category.  In short, I think you make an exception of the mind-brain problem in your standards.

The problem is that, unlike other science, the "results" are not generalizable, one of the principles of a good scientific theory.  So even if you "know" what systems or subsystems or whatever are associated with different kinds of experience, there's no way to generalize that knowledge to non-animal physical systems.  You can study a bowling ball and a feather, and confirm that they both fall at the same rate as gravity, and then generalize that to all objects.  You can't necessarily do that with even a well-mapped human brain-- there is no real THEORY there sufficient to apply our "knowledge" to anything other than some dude sitting in a psych lab.

The other issue, and I've already mentioned it, is in the semantics of the brain as "a thing."  You can say mind is in the brain, but that's like saying mind is in the solar system-- that is clearly true, since the brains that we know allow for mind exist in the solar system, but it's a composition fallacy-- you can't necessarily take the property of a human mind and generalize it to the whole solar system-- though perhaps aliens would be content to say "See that little orange star and its surrounding system?  There's mind in there somewhere."

For example, I have a theory that every exchange of energy (read: information), via photon or electron, could represent a nanoscopic "spark" of mind, i.e. that mind is intrinsic to matter and to everything in the universe, but not in a form that we can easily recognize.  If this is the case, then the brain represents a FORM of elements of mind into a more complex arrangement, but really isn't responsible for psychogony-- the existence of mind. In general, I'd say that the "science" of mind is really just waving-toward-the-brain, since there's no good theory of mind there: and I use the quotes not for insult, but to show that mind study doesn't really follow the same principles that other scientific study follows. In other words, when standards are abused, it's not just me: it's something instrinsic to this particular subject of inquiry.