What is "Mind?"

If only they knew what they were doing.

"Mind" is merely a term we apply to the fact that we are aware of existing in a manner beyond just stimulus and response, and the whole shebang often gets diverted into talk about neurons and the objects of existence.

Here you go again, implying, but never really saying, that mind is fairy dust and woo. You can't hold it in your hand. I disagree. Just as a liver keeps your blood clean from toxins, your brain is responsible for interpreting neuronal stimulus and response, and mind, likewise, can be easily reduced to what the brain does, among other things.

But trying to say that the mind "is just" the brain in any robust sense is even more misguided than claiming that the movie "is just" the camera and film.

Beauty of language magnified. Winter's Tale staging involved strictly governed ancient China vs. Bohemia (Haight meets Ringling Bros.) alternating sets. Next, politically rendered Timon of Athens then on to a motorcycle jacketed Hamlet.

Thus he he makes the fatal mistake of the gross materialists trying to identify everything with only their material senses

That data stream, however, cannot in principle be consciousness. Contrary to Hume and those that have been taken by his line of thinking even today, consciousness is not just a "stream of data" or what is commonly called a "stream of consciousness." Such a "stream" cannot account for many defining features of consciousness, particularly what Kant called the "unity of apperception." There is a unity to my stream of data, yet, in principle, that unity cannot be an "emergent property" of the "stream" itself.

First, I don't think that anybody is saying that mind is the brain. The stance of the "science-types" is that mind is caused by our evolved brain.

Second, it seems to me that all animal behavior (including human) must fundamentally be "emergent", since we know that all life evolved from simple organisms with very simple behaviors. This is just plain logic (assuming that you believe in evolution).

When a predator stalks prey, some sort of imaging system must be present in the predator's brain that allows it to anticipate what they prey will likely do. This imaging system must be an emergent property (it did not exist 3 billion years ago), and it amounts to an "experience" by the predator.

To claim that somehow human consciousness is fundamentally different from this is my main beef with the "specialness" of human consciousness that is claimed by several on this thread.

As a student of philosophy, I wonder if you have ever read John Dewey, who I believe makes the best case for natural empiricism (the philosophy of science, more or less) that I have come across.

These commonplaces prove that experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience that is experienced but nature -- stones, plants, animals, diseases, health, temperature, electricity and so on. Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced. Linked in certain other ways with another natural object -- the human organism -- they are how things are experiences as well. Experience thus reaches down into nature; it has depth. It also has breadth and to an indefinitely elastic extent, it stretches. That stretch constitutes inference.

Thoroughgoing empiricism's implications are precisely what Kant sought to save us from. To the extent that Kant salvaged empiricism, he also established the limitations of its possible inquiries. Namely, we live in an empirical reality. But that fact itself provides the limits of that inquiry, which is that we can't "pull back the curtain" to see the necessarily conditions of the "synthesizer" that produces the "movie" for us.

Just as information is not the writing on the page (nor is is "caused" by it), mind is not the brain (nor is it "caused" by it). The writing on the page "conveys" information, but the causal relation between writing and information is exactly reversed from what the empiricist needs it to be.