How biased are we in thinking the mind is in the brain?

Great Debates
21

The terms are not interchangeable.

One useful model is that the mind is a process hosted by the brain (very similar to the software analogy mentioned by CalMeacham). There used to be a model of the “little man inside” that sat in some throne of power, that’s your mind. But it just deferred the issue. Any attempt to explain the mind as nonphysical invites the question of how can something nonphysical interface with something physical? The answer is that it’s all physical.

There’s not consensus of what consciousness is, however. The mind is reasonably well understood to be an aspect of the brain, although it is still not understood what makes me experience me as me, and makes living beings different than a computer that also takes in sensory input, performs calculations, and produces output. Maybe ultimately a philosophy problem.

22

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

23

Oh. lordy.

CNS: Central Nervous System: The stuff in your cranium. The CNS has a couple of bits to it:

The Thinking Bits, also known as the Cerebral Cortex, the wrinkly outer layers.

The Other Stuff, including the Autonomic Nervous System, which manages the automatic functions like breathing and such, and other stuff that coordinates sensory input and feedback, and memory processing.

The Spinal Cord…

PNS: Peripheral Nervous System: the stuff outside the skull, that hooks up to and feeds back into the spinal cord.

There are also a few organ-local nerve thingies like the nerve bundle that manages cardiac function and rythym.

All current evidence points to the Cerebral Cortex as being the actual center of awareness. Continuing research actually images the cortical functions as people think: it’s gotten pretty advanced and clear.

Moreover, non-CNS neurodegenerative diseases don’t generally affect awareness: only CNS-specific damage affects observable awareness.

Note also the menagarie of CNS diseases that attack specific parts of the CNS, with specific impacts on the awareness and function. Note also the clear correspondance of cognitive and motor deficit that goes with speciifc types and severities of traumatic brain injury and stroke.

Note also the CNS-specific affects of extreme hypoglycemia.

There is simply no evidence to suggest that any other organ systems host cognitive function or awareness.

Don’t even start me on the correspondance of cognitive and motor deficits and CNS birth defects.

As for the “seat of the soul”? This is a nonempirical, nondebatable question.

Empirically speaking, you are your brain.

24

Hey, amazing, finally a thread where I may have something to chip in with…

In the modern day and age, the best clue that the ‘mind’ (whatever it is) resides in the brain is indeed the observed effects on the personality of more or less severe brain damage. However, in earlier times the connection was not always so clear. In the days before modern medicine, any blow to the head serious enough to cause lasting brain damage was usually also enough to kill you.

Our old friends the ancient greeks had different ideas on the subject, competing with the brain-centric theory. From at least Homeric times and onwards, our thoughts, beliefs as well as emotions and states of mind like anger, courage, fear, pride etc. were supposed to be located in the torso- usually in heart or in the belly. If you think about, it makes a kind of sense, and this way of thinking does hang on to this day. After all, you still love someone with “all your heart”, and you have a “gut feeling” about something. When you’re scared, you get an upset stomach and your heart starts pounding rapidly.

One representation of the belief that though is located in the belly, is found in the myth of the swallowing of the goddess Metis by Zeus. Metis was the goddess of wisdom and Zeus’ first wife, and Zeus had been warned that she would bear a daughter, whose son would overthrow him. When she became pregnant, Zeus swallowed her to avoid this. However, this rather gross attack of the munchies also had an added perk for Zeus. According to Hesiod, he lodged Metis in his belly, so that she may advise him. The name Metis indeed means wisdom, and by swallowing her he incorporates wisdom into himself, and puts her right where she needs to be for him to think with her. This makes perfect sense if the belly is the seat of thought, and by extension of wisdom. (On the other hand, of course, the myth of the birth of Athena, the child of Zeus and Metis and another goddess associated with wisdom, states that she was born through Zeus’ forehead. So, it’s complicated…)

The cardiocentric theory, that the mind is found in the heart, was the one that became dominant in antiquity and remained so to a large extent in the middle ages, and was held by many medical writers and physicians, as well as the Stoics. One proponent of this view was Aristotle. He regards the heart as the primary seat of emotions and sensations, as well as the seat of bodily heat and the central part in the body’s hierarchy of bits. It’s also the “central sense organ”, which coordinates the input from the other organs, to which it’s connected through the blood stream, and that issues commands and decisions back to the other body parts. In other words - the heart does for Aristotle what we the brain does for us. So, if Aristotle assumed that we think with our hearts, what the heck did he figure the brain was for? Well, he seems to think that it’s just a kind of heat management system, a kind of fridge, balancing the body heat.

On the other hand, other writers like Plato and Hippocrates did come closer to getting it right and locating the brain as the seat of the mind. Hippocrates firmly states that conciousness is located in the brain. Plato actually wants to have it all three ways at once. He sees the soul as composed of three parts - mind, spirit and desire - which he assigns to being located in respectively the brain, the chest and the belly. So, we think with our brains, but still feel with our hearts and want stuff with our bellies.

A more scientific view on it came about in the third century BCE in Alexandria, when physicians started dissecting bodies and discovered the nervous system. This was further buildt upon by the Roman physician Galen, who did experiments on animals and established the brains as centre of conciousness and sensation. Needless to say, though, this didn’t convince all Aristotelians and Stoics for quite a while yet.

25

What about the glands? They are mind-altering and I assume that they are not part of the CNS.

Separately, is “cognitive function” an overly narrow characterization of “mind”?

26

That´s one thing I wanted to say, having a mother that went through menopause and hiperthiroidism at the same time I can tell you the hormonal and chemical balance in the body does things to your head; changes of personality and such, but not changes on the way the brain works or it´s abilities.

27

How biased are we in thinking the mind is in the brain?

It appears that there are some individuals have theirs in an area that is the last to close in the embryonic/fetus development process.

It is in the blood, isn’t it?

Drain the blood from the body and the mind goes with it!

28

Think of it this way. The brain is the physical organ. The mind is the process, the set of all the stuff that the brain does. If a brain isn’t doing anything (it’s a dead organ), then there is no mind.

29

Well, I think there is a point to be made that the physical seat of the psychological complex we think of as “our minds” or “ourselves” is in fact the body as a whole, not just the head. While the bulk of cognitive function is clearly in the brain, the brain is connected to the rest of the nervous system, & affected by the hormones of the endocrine system. So, I think Zeldar is partly right. Parts of our experience originate outside the skull.

30

I am about to read this book soon, but I’ll advertise it nonetheless.

Neither Brain nor Ghost:

*In this highly original work, Teed Rockwell rejects both dualism and the mind-brain identity theory. He proposes instead that mental phenomena emerge not merely from brain activity but from an interacting nexus of brain, body, and world. The mind can be seen not as an organ within the body, but as a “behavioral field” that fluctuates within this brain-body-world nexus. If we reject the dominant form of the mind-brain identity theory – which Rockwell calls “Cartesian materialism” (distinct from Daniel Dennett’s concept of the same name) – and accept this new alternative, then many philosophical and scientific problems can be solved. Other philosophers have flirted with these ideas, including Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam, Millikan, and Dennett. But Rockwell goes further than these tentative speculations and offers a detailed alternative to the dominant philosophical view, applying pragmatist insights to contemporary scientific and philosophical problems.

Rockwell shows that neuroscience no longer supports the mind-brain identity theory because the brain cannot be isolated from the rest of the nervous system; moreover, there is evidence that the mind is hormonal as well as neural. These data, and Rockwell’s reanalysis of the concept of causality, show why the borders of mental embodiment cannot be neatly drawn at the skull, or even at the skin. Rockwell then demonstrates how his proposed view of the mind can resolve paradoxes engendered by the mind-brain identity theory in such fields as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Finally, he argues that understanding the mind as a “behavioral field” supports the new cognitive science paradigm of dynamic systems theory (DST).*

31

I got a brain transplant. I mean, he did.

32

What happens when one has only brain and body? Examples of feral children come to mind: those raised without human contact tend to have severe developmental problems. More from the Master.

What about brain and world? I am wholly ignorant of cases of say, quadriplegics with hormonal deficiencies. Anybody know about this?

33

Interesting, Gyan - I don’t think I’d have too many problems with such an interpretation (after all, you’ll recall that when looking at light of wavelength 565 nm I suggested that the very light itself was a crucial element in the whole computational process I called “experience”). If a ‘mind’ is a computational process on physical hardware, then of course those physical inputs from ‘the world’ are part of that process. This ‘behavioural field’ sounds a little fishy but it would, at least, be a big step away from the ludicrousness of positing conscious hydrogen atoms.

34

Gyan’s cite has it about right, IMHO.

“The Mind” is an emergent property of systems organization as an organism identifies (and constantly reupdates) “self” from “nonself” using its cognitive and emotional apparatii in the context of an identified external world and subject to the nonlinear influences of that external world and the body’s other systems and a constantly changing entity of “self”.

It doesn’t exist anywhere anymore than the quale “wetness” exists anywhere in particular: it emerges out of the system dynamics which primarily reside in the brain.

35

I’d also add that I don’t think Rockwell’s sounds much different to the dominant philosophical view: heck, most neuroanatomists accept that eg. the retina might as well be considered ‘part of’ the brain, so why not go ahead and let the light incident on the retina into the club as well? It all seems like rather inconsequential semantic thresholding to me, but if it makes physicalism more attractive to some, so be it.

36

My wife and I began discussing the issues in this thread and how they have evolved over the course of this month. I read the entire thread aloud to her and we paused every so often to discuss various issues and sidetracks as they came up. I had decided way back not to engage in the debate but just to watch as it developed and see where things would go without my participation. But the rereading has made me decide to come back for some follow-up comments.

First, for me the key concept in the OP is the word “biased.” Whether it was clearly stated or not, my main issue is not that the brain and mind may indeed be one and the same. It was more a matter of why we would allow that interpretation. What would persuade us to believe such a thing?

Until the last few posts I was pretty much convinced that people’s attitudes toward the issue were heavily “biased” by a tendency toward “reductionism” or whatever the latest term for Science Worship may be. If things cannot be explained through “Science” then they don’t exist – sort of thing. (The people who tend to believe this will probably stop reading right here and label my post as too naive to continue.)

The post that persuaded me to return to this thread for additional questions/comments was the one posted by II Gyan II. It and the subsequent responses have dealt more with the issue of “bias” and I would like to see if that concept can be examined further.

I can’t quote the source, nor even when I must have read it, but some reading I did a decade or more ago made the observation that at roughly the time of Descartes and his philosophical ramblings along the “I think therefore I am” chain of reasoning, along with the developments in the Scientific Method that were concurrent with that, that there was some form of pact made with The Church. Whether it was a real document or just a tacit agreement is unimportant. What was important was that The Church became owner of The Soul and Science became owner of The Body, and never the twain would be discussed in the same terms again. (If somebody has better citations for where and when I would have encountered this notion, please make that known.)

The notion of Paradigms has been intriguing ever since I ran across it back in the 80’s (or whenever). To know that the zeitgeist of our era is predominantly one of Science Rules, with progressively stronger attacks by the faction that prefers God and other Non-Science explanations bringing Science into question, I think it is worthwhile to investigate our biases.

If you can’t admit to your own biases, what kind of bias is that?

37

1)Generally, we think of our eyes and ears as our windows to the world, and a central phenomena of our mind. The seat of the brain is next to these organs. Also, our natural stance is to think our mind is at the vantage point of the eyes. Further, connections of the eyes and ears are traced to within the brain.

2)Incidents like Phineas Gage, where strong personality changes are manifest upon brain trauma. Also see Michael Gazzaniga’s observations of hemispheric disconnect. Basically, noticing changes in mental attributes and performance that follow directly after brain changes.

What Rockwell, author of above cited book, is questioning is whether mind can be localized to the brain. I’ve just started reading the book. Will report when done.

38

Just yesterday, I read a big piece in Rolling Stone called Inside Scientology. The writer told of an agent of the church who endeavored to show that the mind was not in the brain. Now, a few hours later, I’m getting a feeling of deja-voodoo.

Please tell me, good Zeldar, that you aren’t pushing the works of the late science fiction writer Elron. I’d like to know where we stand, okay?

39

I’m not pushing anything beyond the notion of biases we may have toward what explanations make sense to us. If there are some explanations that you just refuse to listen to, on whatever grounds, then if you’re able to identify why you reject those views or explanations with something more concrete than that “they’re stupid” then we can move on to what other views you’re more biased to accept. Closed-mindedness is one of the issues under consideration. A willingness to own up to bias is another.

I have no dog in this hunt beyond the desire to call a spade a spade and to say that bias affects how we receive information, and how we reject it. Some things “make sense” and other things don’t. I’m just asking if we allow the issues to be expressed before we reject them.

Is it simply a matter of fashion as to what we’re really willing to listen to?

40

Shagnasty, I found this comment from you in another thread and it seems more open than what you have posted here.

Isn’t it likely that we don’t know all about mind/body? The OP is about bias.