What is Mind?

Statement of the question:  How are we to make sense of "mind" --- that is to say, awareness, intelligence.  Is mind separate from body?  Is it evolved from some non-aware state, and if so, how did it ever get started?   

Or if it is separate from body, where does it come from?  and --- the big question grappled with by most religions and innumerable  folk tales and supernatural stories --- what happens to it when the body dies?

Logic, and the best working hypotheses I'd been able to develop about other aspects of life and being, told me that mind, awareness, is probably a physical quality rather than something else entirely.   And yet mind feels --- I feel --- quite different.  I can look at my hand typing away on this keyboard, admire the flexible way it moves and the many tasks it can handle, with no problem believing that it's a thing which evolved gradually from simpler forms, requiring no special explanation.   My eye likewise --- I see no problem in its gradual development from slightly sensitized cells to greater and greater sophistication. 

But awareness --- this "place," this Self, from which I look out, observe, and think about all else --- can that be explained in physiological terms?  can it be said to reside in the body --- in the brain?  Intuitively, it seems separate even from the brain.  Is intuition reliable on this?

I have a sense that I'm not the only analytically-minded person who's left this question off to the side, answered tentatively, but with a question mark remaining.  The biggest challenge to an evolutionary explanation was the question of how it would get started, what would be the evolutionary advantage?  It's easy to explain the survival benefit of complex reasoning (though in the end some of our less felicitous human ideas may do us right out of existence), but the complex stuff wouldn't have sprung into existence in full-force.  What is the mind-equivalent of the pre-visual patch of cells that were faintly phototropic?

Well, now I think I've got it.  My new hypothesis is that self-awareness comes before thinking, with the corollary that thinking is an elaboration of awareness.

The only drawback (and it doesn't bother me at all, though it will irritate those who want a huge gap between Homo sapiens and the "lower" animals) is that it goes waaaay back.

Picture the primordial pond and the multicellular creatures eating one another, and being eaten.  In the harsh environment promoting mutations, and the rapid turnover of generations speeding promulgation of the advantageous oddities, the beginnings of sight and scent arrive not long after self-propulsion.

If every now and then one of those small conglomerations of cells has a mutation that lets it differentiate what is itself from what is not itself, think of the advantage!  It can hide itself from a predator; or it can hide and pounce on its unsuspecting prey.  Not hard to believe that it, and its progeny and its variations, would tend to thrive.

Take that and 600 million years of development, and it's not astounding to have a self-aware thinking animal that can consider everything from space travel to genetic engineering to theology.  It wasn't inevitable; if it hadn't happened to happen we wouldn't be here to think about how amazing it is.  But here we are.

Yep.  I relinquish the idea that my mind is some different thing, outside natural explanation.  It's a little disappointing, but not too much so.   (Paul said "All this, just because we could hide!")

Comments

[John Dyer]

I thing we are like a cell inside a body trying to understand and comprehend the whole with the imagery of what we understand from our little corner of the body. The instruments and techniques by which we measure, define, explain, and embody our "knowledge" actually measure, define, explain and embody the inherent limitations of our knowledge. "Mind," "Universe," "multiverse," "Parallel Universe," "god," "mortality," are words derived from those limitations. Whether it is the "Gaia Hypotheis" of biology (The planet is the largest single organism and has a mind) or the "Multiverse" of infinite universes in which infinite varieties of "us" engage in infinite variations on "our" life, science and mysticism have merged and reflect probably the most accurate statement of where we are in relation to all this- there is something "out there" and "around" or "in" and we are just beginning to feel our way toward it. I would not give up on a mind that transcends the physical limits as we have been able to measure and discover them to date. The history of biology is filled with misapprehensions created by the limits of the then instruments and the homocentricity of the inquiry.