What is the human mind?

[kyrolima]

A database? a quantum computer? just a tool for humans to increase survival?
Can we even say that our minds are seperate from our body?

Sometimes I wonder wheater my perception of toughts is beyond the mind or just another part of the mind.

All eastern philosophy claims that this "I" who sees the toughts is beyond the physical.

Somebody got ideas?

 

[TheReadyAwakening]

Well, on a physical level, I believe our entire body is a survival machine. Our brain, an organic supercomputer able to compute multiple thoughts a second, with built in instincts that can control behavior in a situation the person has never experienced before. Not to mention our ability to survive, if not flourish, just about everywhere on the planet.

However, I have often wondered that, if everything in this universe is made out of the same hundred-something molecules, what decides that when certain amounts of water, and other organic molecules are put together in the shape of a person, or a dog, or a tree, what makes them come to life? After all, even a rocks molecules have energy in them. So where does it come from? So yes, I also believe that we have a mind/spirit that is separate from the body, and with the help of DMT, allows it to come and go essentially at will.

So while your physical body is a highly evolved piece of organic machinery, and your brain is definitely what allows you to form these complex thoughts, it is simply the physical vehicle for the hyperphysical spirit, in my opinion. And the fact that blasting off is possible seems to seal the deal for me.

 

[pau]

my mind, your mind ... sitting out in a garden one evening looking down at a freshly planted cactus, I was convinced it's just the Big Bang ... what else could it be? An INFINITELY loving, warm feeling.

 

[Sublime]

This is one of the most important things to me. Is body separate from mind? The way I sometimes look at it is that we are just observers watching someone live life and experience things. We learn from it, suffer, etc. If the mind is separate from the body, then we must not have a soul and the body is just an organism, nothing more. Descartes and Plato explore this idea. Here is something Plato said: "Plato argued that, as the body is from the material world, the soul is from the world of ideas and is thus immortal. He believed the soul was temporarily united with the body and would only be separated at death, when it would return to the world of Forms. Since the soul does not exist in time and space, as the body does, it can access universal truths. For Plato, ideas (or Forms) are the true reality, and are experienced by the soul. The body is for Plato empty in that it can not access the abstract reality of the world; it can only experience shadows." I like to think that it is separate, and thoughts arise elsewhere, not from a universal "I." We are all connected.

 

[kyrolima]

I debated with a friend over this topic.
And i concluded that the mind has to be the perceptor of an interpretation of the reality.
It can never reach reality, because once it comes near enough it jumps into total imagination.

I put that into picture:


mind: Verstand

red line: imagination
green line: reality

 

[RealAwareness]

I lean towards the idea that the mind is more than the brain, that the brain is just, as Huxley thought, a reducing valve for our Mind. Just the fact that when meditating, I can reach an experience of just being, of all my thoughts being stilled, of experiencing an absence of ego, however brief, yet still experience consciousness - the observer behind the thoughts, the metaprogram of which thoughts and ego are simply subroutines - for me, anyways, it gives weight to the idea that mind is separate from body. There is certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence to support that from historical Buddhist studies of consciousness.

Consciousness is one of the most difficult topics in both science and philosophy. Roger Penrose put forth a theory several years ago that Mind is a product of a series of collapses of the quantum wave function, that the brain is indeed a Quantum Computer. Too, there are growing numbers of scientists who are postulating that awareness is a fundamental property of the Universe, like Gravity - and that the greater the organizational complexity of matter, the greater the awareness. Awareness only achieves self-awareness at extremely high levels of complexity; to wit, the human mind. We are like crystallized focus points of Mind.

Too, in mathematics, Platonism is very much alive and well, though by no means universally held. Mathematical objects such as the Mandelbrot set are not invented or conceived so much as they are discovered.

In Philosophy, the concept of Qualia, or (to oversimplify), the qualitative nature of subjective experience, is held by many to be irreducible to physical or deterministic explanations. For if all that we are could be explained in reductionist terms, then mind-body dualism ala Descartes would be a non-issue; an illusion.

My personal opinion is that consciousness is probably non-reducible - but the jury is very much still out on this one, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.