What is "Mind?"

Jgill: Exercise your imagination and give us something that hasn't been recycled a hundred times. You're smart.

DMT: A perfect example of word-games.

Ed said: No physicist actually believes that the electron has no-extent, we don't know what causes it to have extent. You can describe it better as "not yet a thing" which is different than "no thing" which is a good provisional description, but doesn't correctly describe the situation. If we take String Theory as a model then the electrons have finite extent. . . . We might not know what the hell we are talking about now, but that doesn't have any relevance to whether or not we will in the future.

The mantra of this thread has been the evolutionary notions of chance and survival and the idea that the human mind is simply a product of that crucible, but the truth seems to be that much of what is mind stands apart from those very practical necessities.

Mysterious, don't you think?

Moose: Do you believe what you write here?

Jstan: Believe- to think something is a useful model of reality entirely in the absence of confirming data . . . . Believe- to think something is a useful model of reality

To get around this confusion just say you think something, and why.

MH2: I think chance can account for part of the mystery.

if something analogous is not verified in physics

First off, you got “mystery”—which is something that you have no clue about. I mean, it's a mystery, right? Then you account for what you have no clue about (can’t even way what it is other than “mystery”) by you drawing out an explanation that you can't test if situations are contextually or content-wide unique. (Perhaps an assumption on my part, eh?) What is chance, anyway, and how could anyone account for it—much less using it to explain something called, “mystery?”

mystery (n,)
early 14c., in a theological sense, "religious truth via divine revelation, hidden spiritual significance, mystical truth," from Anglo-French *misterie, Old French mistere "secret, mystery, hidden meaning" (Modern French mystère), from Latin mysterium "secret rite, secret worship; a secret thing," from Greek mysterion (usually in plural mysteria) "secret rite or doctrine," from mystes "one who has been initiated," from myein "to close, shut" (see mute (adj.)); perhaps referring to the lips (in secrecy) or to the eyes (only initiates were allowed to see the sacred rites).

The Greek word was used in Septuagint for "secret counsel of God," translated in Vulgate as sacramentum. Non-theological use in English, "a hidden or secret thing," is from late 14c. In reference to the ancient rites of Greece, Egypt, etc. it is attested from 1640s.

Research involving a former brain-eating tribe from Papua New Guinea is helping scientists better understand so-called prion conditions such as Parkinson's disease and dementia.

People of the Fore tribe, studied by scientists from Britain and PNG, have developed genetic resistance to a mad cow-like disease called kuru (a prion condition), which was spread mostly by the now abandoned ritual of eating relatives' brains at funerals.

Experts say the cannibalistic practice led to a major epidemic of kuru prion disease among the Fore people, which at its height in the late 1950s caused the death of up to 2 per cent of the population each year.

In findings published in the scientific journal Nature, the researchers said they had identified the specific prion resistance gene — and found that it also protects against all other forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

"This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia," said John Collinge of the Institute of Neurology's prion unit at University College London, which co-led the work.

Prions are infectious agents that cause often fatal brain diseases such as CJD in humans, scrapie in sheep and BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease) in cattle.

They are also a rare but important cause of dementia, and scientists say it is now recognised that the process involved in these diseases — in which prion proteins change shape and stick together to form polymers that damage the brain — is also what happens in common dementias such as Alzheimer's, and in Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Mr Collinge said his team was now conducting more studies to understand the molecular basis of this effect, hoping to find clues on the seeds of other misshapen proteins that develop in the brain and cause the common forms of dementia.
Worldwide, about 47.5 million people have dementia and there are 7.7 million new cases every year, according to the World Health Organisation.

The total number of cases is projected to reach 75.6 million in 2030 and to almost triple by 2050 to 135.5 million.