Where the body is, the mind is. The mind is not an independent entity or a separate realm but an emergent process of the body’s material existence. Thoughts, emotions, and awareness are grounded in the physical processes of the brain and nervous system, which are inseparable from the body. To speak of the mind apart from the body is to misunderstand its nature. The mind is always embodied, and its experiences are situated where the body is, in space and time. Recognizing this eliminates the disorientation caused by dualistic separations and firmly roots the mind in material reality.
Tag: monism
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Thinking is never apart of the physical being that does the action. Thinking is therefore an action of a physical being.
I am a physical thinking being, therefore I am.
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Interesting and insightful that Descartes leaves material as the last to be understood in his meditations.
Indeed, there is nothing a priori about experience. We have to go through it (experience it) to reach a conclusion about what thinking is or what does thinking. For Descartes he decided by the second meditation that it was the mind. I also had thought it was the mind. Jeffrey Kaplan thought we have inherited this belief from Descartes and have continued to run with it as common sense. But common sense it is not.
Some time later I have come to believe this is wrong, that I am not a mind, but a body with mind processes (thinking). The thinking thing is not the mind but the body.
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Reality is the entirety of objects, inferred space and inferred time.
Experience are the sensations of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, the processing of these sensations into coherent information as knowledge, and reaction to these sensations, including the sensations of mental processing, information and knowledge forming.
It is easy to understand what the sense inputs are as they have corresponding organs. But the mental organ was not understood until recently. Damage occurring to certain parts of the brain will affect different faculties. From such damage or aphasia we slowly have com to understand the role of the brain, noting that it is no different to the organs like the eyes or ears.
The brain with no noticeable moving parts like the other sense organs make it difficult to understand. Seemingly, it is inert. Yet this is where the faculty of mind and consciousness is. Damage the eye and your vision is impaired. Damage your leg and your ability to run is limited. Damage your brain and your ability to process the sensory information as well as your ability to respond to this information is affected.
Experience is the entirety of the physical input-processing-output process. There are no examples of mind or consciousness that is independent of the body or brain. We must take this lack of evidence seriously even if there is seemingly something we would like to call the mind or consciousness. The process of mind or consciousness occurs in the body. This is where we experience it, whether we are aware of this fact or not.
Calling it my mind does not bring it into existence. Calling it my consciousness does not bring it into existence. From experience, I had come to learn and understand this.
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There are particulars and the entire set of unique particulars.
Everything in between are universals.
There is nothing more specific to particulars and nothing more general to the set.
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The mind is identical to the process of the body.
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I reject mind-only monism, monadology, and mind-body dualism, and accept only material monism as philosophically feasible.
I am not eliminative of the mind (I believe there is usefulness in talking about something called the mind) but I am explanatory of it through the physical but see a danger in conceiving it as an object like the body (a Rylean categorical mistake).
We must explore the possibility that language and subsequently language-based concepts play a large role in determining or influencing how we think about things and, more importantly, non-things.
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I believe many philosophers and philosophies perceptually mis-arrange the internal and external worlds.
This mis-arrangement can be evidenced from their language. The descriptions given usually speak of separate worlds. This in itself is not a problem. The problem is in what way are they separate. The common mis-arrangement is one of internal and external worlds being exclusive, when in reality, the external world, by definition, includes the internal world.
theoria 