Do You Mind?
It’s hard to talk about the mind as if it were something
that could be analyzed or described. We try and do that a lot in philosophy,
religion, science, politics, psychology and psychiatry. Some people are paid a
whole lot more than I am to be an expert on the inner workings of the mind.
Still even more people are paid even more than those people on manufacturing
drugs that alter the operation of the mind.
Strictly speaking, none of us really know what the mind is
or how it works. How can we? Everything we think, perceive or do is centered in
the mind. We know nothing outside of it and can’t perceive anything without it.
So how can we possibly objectively figure out what it is or how it works when
we having no experience to compare it to?
That doesn’t stop us from trying.
Science believes that the mind is the result of specific
mental processes the brain takes care of to handle sensory inputs. Some processes
are easy to figure out (brain makes legs walk), but some are not so easy (brain
makes hatred for voting results of American Idol). Psychology attempts to
understand the mind through human behavior. It finds patterns and describes the
processes based on those patterns and woe to you if you do not fit in a
pattern. You may get scolded, or sent you may get drugs to alter chemical
responses in your brain.
Philosophers are a bit less technical. They think the mind
may be more than just the result of synapses firing in the brain. Dualistic
philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, maintain that mind and body are
separate entities and functions. Monistic philosophers, like Spinoza and
Parmenides, think that the mind is actually physical even though we haven’t
figured out how to quantify it yet. More modern philosophers think that that
some things about the mind are separate than the body and other things aren’t.
There is also debate on what the word mind actually refers
to. Some think it means all mental faculties, but others move emotion and other
fundamental emotions as primitive instinct and not a mental process at all.
Others, like Freud or Jung state that there is a higher form of consciousness
that is untapped by regular thinking.
Some things we can all agree on, the mind conducts mental
processes, stores our perceptions of the world in memory, is capable of conceiving
immaterial concepts and can perceive the relationship of one’s self with the
environment. What that actually means to us as people is the subject of great
debate.
Perhaps we debate this topic because it is impossible for us
to remove ourselves from the confines of mental perception. There is no way for
us to know, objectively, how the mind works because at some point all of our
perceptions of the world around us are eventually interpreted and translated by
the mind. Does that mean we should give it up? No – but it means that some of
these answers may exist in one place: our own minds. And we may never get the
same answer as someone else.
Do You Mind by Mark Havenner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Photo courtesy of pike55151 at flickr.com
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