What is "Mind?"

The human ability to visually recognize objects is mediated by a hierarchy of complex feature representations along the ventral stream.
...
The first layer is responsible for detecting straight lines, changes in brightness and other simple visual features," the researchers explain. "This information is passed onto the second layer, which combines simple features to build detectors that can identify simple shapes. And so it progresses, becoming more and more abstract with every layer, with the higher layer neurons representing whole objects, such as cats, dogs and so on. We knew that a very similar phenomenon is observed in the human visual cortex, so the obvious question was: How similar are these two systems, and what are their similarities?

Don: Do you not believe Darwin's theory of natural selection is true? 

healyje: What are emotions?

On the other hand, I suppose you're looking for a biological-chemical causal explanation.

"This guy would be an awesome grandpa."

Don: Do you not believe Darwin's theory of natural selection is true?
I’d say it’s descriptive, metaphorically. (I'm not sure of the theory's usefulness.)

This work provides an example of an engineered complex system, with multiple autonomous robots following simple, local rules and collectively achieving a specific desired result. Tools drawn from the social insects that inspire our approach—the exploitation of regularities that arise from identical programming in multi-agent systems, and the use of the environment as a means of implicit coordination—make these results possible. Future progress in our ability to design complex systems will advance our capacity to engineer systems that work as nature does

we all occupy the here and now, all successful so far.
That is really the only measure.

Mike L said: I’d say it’s descriptive, metaphorically. (I'm not sure of the theory's usefulness.)

eeyonkee said: Really? Sheesh!!! The right answer would be something like it is THE founding principle of biology! You should take a break from this thread, MikeL.

After the manifestation of life, modern science believed that chemical evolution transformed itself into biological evolution, which then had caused the entire biodiversity on our planet.
The ontological view of the organism as a complex machine presumes life as just a chance occurrence, without any inner purpose. This approach in science leaves no room for the subjective aspect of consciousness in its attempt to know the world as the relationships among forces, atoms, and molecules.
On the other hand, the Vedantic view states that the origin of everything material and nonmaterial is sentient and absolute (unconditioned).
Thus, sentient life is primitive and reproductive of itself – omne vivum ex vivo – life comes from life.
This is the scientifically verified law of experience.
Life is essentially cognitive and conscious.
And, consciousness, which is fundamental, manifests itself in the gradational forms of all sentient and insentient nature.
In contrast to the idea of objective evolution of bodies, as envisioned by Darwin and followers.

By metaphorically assuming an organism as a machine, biologists try to come to terms with many of its properties and features.
Following this approach, biologists have only made an attempt to discover the physical properties and chemical processes of different biomolecules present within the body of a living organism.
Such mechanical investigations of living organisms have always failed to provide any successful mechanical explanations of living organisms.
Therefore, such a reductionistic analysis is just a pretension to study life, but in actuality, it only deals with the study of dead matter (abiology).
As we know very well, “an organism is something which the scientific method cannot deal with; it is a hard, round, smooth nut,
which experimental analysis can neither crack nor lever open at any point. As soon as a hole is made in it, it explodes like a Prince Rupert drop and vanishes away.”

Noble prize winner, Szent-Györgyi also brilliantly presented the outcome of the mechanistic view of an organism:

“As scientists attempt to understand a living system, they move down from dimension to dimension, from one level of complexity to the next lower level.
I followed this course in my own studies. I went from anatomy to the study of tissues, then to electron microscopy and chemistry, and finally to quantum mechanics.
This downward journey through the scale of dimensions has its irony, for in my search for the secret of life, I ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all.
Somewhere along the line life has run out through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am now retracing my steps, trying to fight my way back.”


Traditionally, in both eastern and western philosophy, life is understood as a cognitive or sentient principle.
Sentience cannot be manufactured artificially by any noble mechanical and chemical arrangement of dead atoms and molecules.
In the ancient eastern philosophy based on the Vedāntic or Bhagavat paradigm, for example, the invocation of Śrī Īśopanisad provides the concept of ‘Organic Wholism

The ‘Organic Whole’ produces ‘organic wholes’. An ‘organic whole’ cannot arise from parts that have to be assembled.
That process can only produce inorganic, mechanical or chemical processes, not living organisms.”

healyje: Do they [emotions] only exist and have influence when you're consciously aware of them? If not, then what does that say or mean?

eeyonkee: The right answer would be something like it is THE founding principle of biology! You should take a break from this thread, MikeL.

Ed: we all occupy the here and now, all successful so far. That is really the only measure.

I’d say quite the opposite, if one reads some of the literature. I’d point you to Paul Ekman. Ekman’s work has been useful to the Israelis profiling of terrorists in transportation. The face supposedly has 150+ muscles in it, half of which are controllable. The other half of them is not. No matter whose culture a face is from, says Ekman, they express the same emotions in the same way.

The emotion paradox is as follows. People have vivid and intense experiences of emotion in day-to-day life: they report seeing emotions like "anger", "sadness", and "happiness" in others, and they report experiencing "anger", "sadness" and so on themselves. Nevertheless, psychophysiological and neuroscientific evidence has failed to yield consistent support for the existence of such discrete categories of experience.[4] Instead, the empirical evidence suggests that what exists in the brain and body is affect, and emotions are constructed by multiple brain networks working in tandem.[5][6]

Despite this evidence, most other theories of emotion assume that emotions are genetically endowed, not learned, and are produced by dedicated circuits in the brain: an anger circuit, a fear circuit, and so on. This point of view is very much in line with common-sense conceptions of emotion. The theory of constructed emotion calls this assumption into question. It suggests that these emotions (often called "basic emotions"[7]) are not biologically hardwired, but instead are phenomena that emerge in consciousness "in the moment" from more fundamental ingredients.

A brain did not evolve for rationality, happiness or accurate perception.

That might be one measure of the "usefulness" of a theory. If a theory doesn't give you a clue, in terms of specific details, what will happen in the future, it might seem reasonable to doubt it's usefulness.

Learn a little more about the scientific method and its ins and outs.

Similarly, as has been suggested way up thread, there is no "mind," it is just our description of the behavior of our brain.