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: philosophy of mind
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The self (this mind, this consciousness, this spirit, this soul, this ego) is a very good illusion. The others (those minds, those, consciousnesses, those spirits, those, souls, those egos) are also a very good illusion.
But there is nothing illusionary about this body, and those objects.
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I do not need to know every detail of a car in order to utilize it. As long as I know it needs petrol, steering, acceleration, and braking controls, I can use it.
This applies to everything else, including the body I inhabit. It may well be a mistake (I tend to think it is) to say inhabit as though there are separate objects – a body and a mind. The mind may be a very good illusion.
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Thought and symbolism are actions. I am a body with mind actions (thoughts and symbols). Thoughts and language do not bring about things. Things bring about thoughts and language. The first task is to orient oneself correctly about these entities.
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Referent is what goes on in the physical world. Concept is what goes on in the head. Symbol is what goes on in language. Both concept and symbol go on in physical world as processes.
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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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The body causes the mind.
Without the body there is no underlying mind action. The process of thinking is like any bodily process such as walking, sitting, sleeping.
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I have observed 1) bodies with minds, 2) bodies without minds, 3) minds with bodies, but 4) never minds without bodies.
The evidence suggests that bodies are prime. Bodies exist without minds, even if it means in state of brain death, vegetative state, or death. Minds are instantiated as body processes. Minds, whatever they are, rely on the biological substrate. Without bodies, there are no minds (again, whatever minds are, if they are anything at all).
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How does one justify a mental substance when there is no evidence of a body-independent mind? The substantialness of something like a unicorn or someone like Harry Potter is as real as the imagination makes it. Are we not duped by the same trick of the imagination for the mind?
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All along we are stuck in the paradigm where the mind owns the body, where the mind is seen as whole and the body part.
When we have a body owner paradigm the body is whole and the mind is part.
By flipping the paradigm many problems dissolve. What once were hard problems become easy ones.
theoria 