What is the mind?

DM Bolser dmb106 at york.ac.uk
Thu Dec 3 16:04:25 EST 1998

> Replace the euphemism "mind" with "soul". The present day usage of "mind"
> arose in the first half of the nineteenth century among people who wished to
> discuss soul but also wished to have themselves known as freethinkers. So
> just say soul (mind, self, intelligence, whatever) and relegate the whole
> discussion to religion.

That is the long and the short of it, but remember that not only has the
usage of the word 'mind' changed, but also the concept of 'soul'. So where
mind now stands for soul, what we think we mean when we say soul has
changed. I beleive I have a soul, but is created in a physical way, in a
totally physical universe. My soul is the self that experiances all the
things 'I' do. This is to say that mind is very much a part of cog-sci, it
is not somthing we don't have to worry about. 

> >For similar reasons I would recommend that "the mind" should not even
> >be taken to denote a *software* or process sort of thing. Not that
> >there are no such things:  the control software executing inside a
> >cruise missile is one, and similar sorts of processes may occur inside
> >our brains. But "the mind" is not even that sort of thing, any more
> >than a personality is. Much better to think of the mind in the way
> >Aristotle did, as a collection of capacities that can be actualized in
> >the flesh and bone of a human being.  This conception includes
> >distinctively intellectual capacities like the power of thinking.
> Nonsense. The brain does the thinking, the soul experiences the activity of
> neurons and calls it thoughts. Philosophy is just watered down religion
> without God.

HA ha ha ha ha, Do you have any idea what you are talking about? Do you
not know about the link between science and philosophy? Basically science
was a philosophy which could predict and proove its postulates, so was
maths. All thinking started in philosophy, some fields lent them selves to
answers more easily than others, but all philosophies none the less.

P.S. Why did you go quiet when I asked you about the mind killer drug? Is
it because it is an argument against dualism, a concept vastly out of date
and defunked, which you happen to beleive? 

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