Mind Over Matter

 What is the mind?  And how is it different from the brain?  The difference between mind and matter has been an  ongoing philosophical topic since the ancient Greeks.  The mind is something subjective, subject to our passions.  It’s not a thing, but our self-reflecting ongoing experience that is about things and about ourselves. It can focus on what is possible, what happened before, what might happen, and what should happen, whereas the brain is a thing, a physical organ that is none of the above.  We only need be conscious of our brain if it affects our mind when something goes wrong, as, when we get hit on the head or we have a stroke.  But that’s not the whole story because it is obvious that brains are necessary for our minds to function at all .

The existence of the brain doesn’t explain what’s going on in our mind, because the mind is “about” things, it “contains”  thoughts and sensations which together have meaning for us and refer both to external things and to other concepts that we might be thinking about.  Whereas, the brain always has physical processes going on, none of which are ever “about” anything.  These physical processes don’t have meaning in themselves, and they are not a part of a larger meaning. For instance, we know that metaphors are not real. They don’t exist in the brain, but in the mind. Metaphors help us to understand the world and our own minds, because they are used to construct meaning, to help us focus in a certain way,  rather than another.  The idea of contents of the mind is a metaphor, the mind isn’t a thing like a container that contains things like candies, but the mind  metaphorically “contains” thoughts and feelings.

Our mind is always experiencing, “containing” a constant flow of meanings such that, to understand what is going on in our minds we need to refer to concepts like “self” as well as our feelings and thoughts.  When we talk about what is ultimately important to us, we often refer to concepts like love, connection, identity, coherence, cooperation, spirit, solidarity, creativity, and productivity.  These are concepts that have significance for us, powerful meanings that link to our hopes, joys, fears, and regrets.  These “contents” are abstractions that link us to things and processes going on in our world. They are combined in our minds with our memories of our past, and our ongoing involvement in our current projects, as well as our anticipation of the future. 

 But the mind is not a thing that one can study objectively like a brain, because it is involved in our world in a hermeneutic or self-enclosed manner.  The mind cannot exist without referring to itself, whereas the outside world exists largely independently of our consciousness of it.  The sun isn’t affected in the slightest by how we think or feel about it.  The milky way galaxy is indifferent to our fate, it is not affected whether life exists or not.  But the mind is changed by our thoughts and feelings.

 Understanding the brain is not the same as understanding the mind.  We need consciousness and memory in order to be able to do  things and make progress.  If our brains are damaged this will adversely affect our abilities to do these things.  So knowing about material processes helps us to understand when something goes wrong with our minds, and sometimes helps us to know how to make it better, but a lot of times, brain damage is not fixable so we have to live with dysfunction for the rest of our lives.  But when brain systems are working, understanding how they work adds nothing to our understanding of what is going on in our minds, because what is going on “inside” has to do with meanings that refer to other meanings in the flow of consciousness.  “meanings” and abstractions don’t exist on the physical level of the brain because they are not things.  They are strictly mind-dependent in a way that is foreign to things. 

I would put it this way:  In order to understand how I play a  musical instrument, you understand by watching and hearing me play as well as by having a conversation about it.  We might have a conversation about what kinds of music I like, what musical pieces I can play and what instruments I’ve learned to play them on.  This understanding is not helped by knowing which neurons in my brain are firing at time t1, because those neurons are not about my likes and dislikes, my abilities, and  my performance, nor the particular music I’m playing.  Neurons in the brain are not metaphorically referring to other things or experiences.  We only need to know about them if something goes wrong and the process of experience is halted or distorted..

 To put it in technical philosophical terms, the mind is not physical it is epistemological, it is the process of knowing about ourselves and other things that has a continuity that is inescapably self-referential. The physical nature of our knowing or experiencing is not that relevant, although  it can be, but it usually doesn’t help us to understand about the  things that we want to understand.  What we want to understand are about the things and thoughts we encounter.    Knowing which group of neurons are firing in my brain has nothing to do with knowing how I play or feel about playing music.  There is no music in the physical processes of the brain, no meaning located there, and no experience located there. 

 Experience is metaphorically located in the mind, but it is not physically located in the brain, because meaning doesn’t have a physical location, in the way that neurons in the brain have a physical location. Meaning is an act of consciousness, a way of focusing on things that cohere with us. This coherence is not understood objectively but instead is understood metaphorically through the association of other  meanings. It is in this sense highly circular or hermeneutic.   We generally have concerns that are about ourselves or others, or things, or situations, or possible events - this is what occupies our minds. This concern in our minds always comes back to itself, and never exists independently out there free floating outside of our consciousness.  That’s the nature of consciousness, there is a changing flow of ideas and sensations that we become aware of and then cease to be aware.  These come to us unbidden and recede into the background.  Momentarily we focus on these contents and then our focus changes, but sometimes returns to the same contents.  That’s not how physical things work. They don’t usually come to us unbidden, we encounter them whenever we are doing anything in the world. They don’t recede from us in a flow, unless they are a river, but in our minds that flowing aspect, the coming towards and rushing away is metaphorical and not an actual river.  A river is not about something in the way that our flow of thoughts is about things. When we read a book, watch a show, or have a conversation these can be about things, so what we encounter in the world, if it is to do with our relations with others and their productions, can have this quality of “aboutness”, but in general, physical things we encounter, like flesh, rocks, and water don’t have this epistemological and metaphorical quality.

We are so used to referring to physical things and processes that sometimes it’s easy to think that that’s all there is:  it’s what we all see together, what is publicly available for everyone to encounter, given our sensory limitations, and our technological adaptations. However we have concepts like “meaning”, “mind”, “spirit”, and  “soul” that refer to our experience - our values, our selves, our thinking, and our sensations and feelings.  These are not things, but, instead are the contents of our consciousness, they are metaphors that come together to form meanings that we focus on, because we are concerned with what they are about. These are epistemological, in that they together build up our knowledge and understanding rather than being a part of  the bricks and mortar of our physical world.

In this way I think I can be realistic about the mind without falling for dualism, the Cartesian doctrine that the mind is a different kind of thing or substance from physical matter. The mind is epistemological rather than metaphysical.   In other words, the mind and its contents is the very process of knowing about and understanding itself and the world and not physical entities or residues from this process that somehow exist inside our brains. But that doesn’t make mental events some special kind of non-physical entity.  Rather than being a part of the physical world, they form the very process of knowing and understanding itself.