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Can the mind be physical?
- Thread starter Yerda
- Start date
Yerda
Veteran Member
Would you agree that what we percieve is the contents of the mind?
psychoslice
Veteran Member
The mind is produced from the physical, it cannot be without the physical, no mind body organism, then no mind.
Yerda
Veteran Member
No brain, never mind!
Is the mind itself physical and does this question make any sense?
psychoslice
Veteran Member
No the question doesn't make sense, because the mind is trying to work it out. But like I said, no mind body organism, no mind.
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Your just playing with words, no body, no mind......but what is beyond the mind, that is what I am interested in.
psychoslice
Veteran Member
Yes I don't understand, and never do I want to, I am my own religion, and I have my own inner understanding of what my religion is, my cup is always empty, not full like yours.
psychoslice
Veteran Member
And to you also ,my friend. I do mean that.
One way to answer the question is to distinguish between physical systems and physical processes. The classic (indeed the foundational) example is (M,R)-systems per Rosen & relational (as well as systems) biology. For example:
"Rather than break everything down in the usual reductionist manner, these transitions are selected for an important distinguishing property, namely their expression of process rather than material things directly. This is best explained with an example. The system Rosen uses for an example is the Metabolism-Repair or [M,R] system. The process, f, in this case stands for the entire metabolism going on in an organism. This is, indeed, quite an abstraction. Clearly, the use of such a representation is meant to suppress the myriad of detail that would only serve to distract us from the more simple argument put this way. It does more because it allows processes we know are going on to be divorced from the requirement that they be fragmentable or reducible to material parts alone. In this way the existence of context dependence and self-reference is no longer a problem. That is what is gained at the expense of the reductionist focus on material parts. The idea is that if the whole is more than the sum of the parts there must be a meaningful way of representing this whole.
The transition, f, which is being called metabolism, is a mapping taking some set of metabolites, A, into some set of products, B. What are the members of A? Really everything in the organism has to be included in A, and there has to be an implicit agreement that at least some of the members of A can enter the organism from its environment. What are the members of B? Many, if not all, of the members of A since the transitions in the reduced system are all strung together in the many intricate patterns or networks that make up the organism’s metabolism."
Functional processes can be based in the dynamics of physical systems without being reduced to them. This is a kind of "weak materialism". The "mind' cannot be any more physical that the functional process "metabolism" (which is the name we give to a function defined by various and differing processes yet which is absolutely grounded in the physical). This does mean we need to suppose the mind cannot "emerge" from the brain's neurophysiological dynamics.
Cephus
Relentlessly Rational
The mind is an emergent property of the brain. It takes place within the physical brain. Without the brain, there is no mind. It's like cyberspace. It might feel like a huge thing but in reality, it just takes place inside of millions of computers. If you turn those computers off, cyberspace goes away. The same is true of the mind. When you're dead, your mind ceases to exist.
Not and still be mind, no. If you refer to the physical, you refer to brains and thought processes, etc. The word "non-physical" was adapted just to deal with references to things that "go on" "in" the mind.
Mind is a figurative landscape for the things we abstract from the world (like subtracting is taking away, abstracting is lifting away). We lift some things out of the word by giving them names, recognizing them in terminology, and manipulating them in those terms. So they exist only in word, but represent real things--things like courage and bravery, deviousness and deceit, promise and hope, and relation. These things are the non-physical.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I think so. A viscous culmination stemming from what enables "mind" to manifest as it is and degrade. I like ben d's response as well. It's fitting and accurate. Shame that the perception we call mind drops away, but it certainly will eventually.
Yes, although we necessarily project some back into the world to be the real world.
The ones we project are the ones that we call, "true."
nazz
Doubting Thomas
Yes, it's meaningful and the answer is no.
CarlinKnew
Well-Known Member
Someone answered this question beautifully once and I never forgot it. The mind is an action of the brain, just as throwing is an action of the arm. Can throwing be physical?
Ben Dhyan
Veteran Member
I understand what you are saying but there is more to it than that...for there is a universal mind which manifests the very physical universe which science involves itself in..
The so called emergent property you call mind is in fact temporary brain consciousness that indeed ceases to exist when the brain is dead. The universal mind otoh is eternal and the human body is its manifestation as is all else that exists..