What is "Mind?"

A Medal of Merit awarded to all who have participated on this thread.

Why is religion so prevalent? | Fear of the unknown and unanswered questions.

How/why did morality evolve? | Pain and empathy.

Interesting bias and individualization of these issues.

What is mind?

Humans have always been social animals who have lived in groups as do all of our primate relatives. The group came first and indiviuation came later, reaching its peak in modern America.

Religion has its roots in fear of the unknown.

In primates, it's individual biological imperatives and hardwired drivers that come first and set the stage for all subsequent group and social behavior. The only instances of group-first imperative and hardwiring I know of are social insects.

1.i: MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE

A host of intriguing questions about mind and its place in nature occur to most thinking people. (The FAQs of the mind, Web-users might say.) As explained in the Preface, some have puzzled me for almost as long as I can remember—and I usually found that my friends were puzzled by them too. They centered on the nature of mind and the mind–body problem; the evolution of mind; freedom and purpose; and how various psychopathologies are possible. Most of the topics studied in cognitive science fall
under one of these broad categories. And those which don’t, such as the nature of computation, are closely related to them.

a. Questions, questions . . .
We’re intrigued by consciousness, for example. We know there are close correlations between brain events and conscious states—but why is that so? The answer seems to be that our brains generate our consciousness. But how do they do this, in practice? Even more puzzling, how can they do this, in principle? Or maybe we only think we know this?

Some people argue that it doesn’t even make sense to suggest that there are correlations between conscious states and brain states. How could anyone with any common sense be led to make such a deeply counterintuitive claim? Perhaps ‘‘common sense’’ itself is radically misguided here (and was radically different in other historical periods)?

What about dogs and horses: are they conscious? And snails, flies, newts . . . ? For that matter, what about newborn babies: are they conscious in anything like the sense in which adult humans are? What of machines? Could a machine be conscious—and if not, why not? People often wonder whether a creature has to have a brain, or something very like one, to be intelligent. If so, why?

Is a brain (as well as eyes) needed to see, for example? What do the visual brain cells do that the retinal cells don’t? What about intelligent action? How, for instance, does the brain convert an Olympic diver’s intention to dive into the finely modulated bodily movements that ensue? If we knew this, could we drop talk of intentions and refer only to brains instead?

Consider chimps, or cats: what can their brains do, and what can’t they do? And what can they do without the mammalian (and avian) glory, the cerebral hemispheres? Given that Homo sapiens evolved from lower animals,what does this tell us about our mental powers? Can anything interesting be learnt about the human mind by studying distantly related species such as frogs, or insects?

As for machines, just how—if at all—must an artifice resemble a real brain if it’s even to seem to support a mind? And even if studying insects can teach us something about ourselves, what about studying inanimate tin cans—like a Mars robot, or an automatic controller in a chemical factory?
How could these things (sic) possibly be relevant?

What mental powers does a human brain provide, and how does it manage to do so?

How is free will possible? And creativity? Are creative ideas unpredictable, and if so why? What are emotions—and do they conflict with rationality, or support it?

Are our abilities inborn, or determined by experience? And how does the brain get its detailed anatomical structure: from genetics or from the environment—or perhaps even from spontaneous self-organization? (Is that last suggestion mere hand-waving, more magic than science?) Do we all share psychological properties that mould every human culture? Perhaps the same underlying sense of beauty: maybe in symmetry, or expanses of water?

I would most strenuously disagree and suggest your analysis is little more than a feel-good fairytale the religiously-inclined tell themselves. Fear was experienced far in advance of the sublime. Fear is the basis of most of today's religions and, hell, even the Buddhists in Myanmar have been driven to genocide by fear.

That’s cool. I expect there’s a psychology study somewhere where they measured these things, and observed that human minds spend more time experiencing the sublime than they do experiencing fear.