I was making the ha-ha. Before he even starts the book, the first two sentences of his preface boil down to, “But seriously guys, I don’t know how the mind works.”
Yup! “This book is about the brain, but I will not say much about neurons , hormones and neurotransmitters. That is because the mind is not the brain but what the brain does…”
One is gray and convoluted and filled with dark and musty furrows and seldom-used crevasses. The other is the brain.
Although the comment that one can change her mind but not her brain was meant as a joke, recently it has been discovered that the brain retains some plasticity throughout adulthood. New synapses can be made, but in addition, we now know that even neurons can be regenerated.
Brain: the organ inside your skull consisting of 2 or 3 pounds of squidgy, grey material.
Mind: the convenient label we use for what we perceive of the apparent activity and operation of the brain, such as emergent sensations, feelings and thoughts.
No. See #18 above.
I think a reasonable analogy to the relationship between the brain and the mind might be the relationship between the heart and the pulse. The heart is the physical organ, the pulse is the process the heart creates.
Okay, I’ve seen #18. So what? I stand by what I wrote because it’s correct, and nothing in #18 is a reason for me to think otherwise.
Okay, at risk of moving this into Great Debates territory…
I’m currently taking a course in Introductory Philosophy at a not particularly renound college. The professor discussed Descartes, and in doing so mentioned that Descartes said, and I quote the professor here, “Matter cannot think”. This relates to previous lessons we’ve had wherein the difference between mind and brain has been paramount, and a vital step in the theories being discussed.
I, of course, being an atheist or at least in this case a materialist, disagree. I believe that the brain (matter) does in fact think (mind). I used the following as one example of evidence for my viewpoint:
Consider alcohol. Alcohol affects the brain (matter). This in turn affects the mind (changed thinking) and not simply in altered perceptions (little pink elephants) but actual changed thought processes. Therefore, since changing the brain changes the mind, it must be that the matter is in fact doing the thinking… otherwise, how could the mind be changed?
He dismissed my question as “equivocating” and went on to other topics, and this really annoyed me. As a result I didn’t bother going into other examples, such as brain damage, surgery, and other situations in which the brain being changed does clearly and distinctly change the mind.
Does my point make sense to anyone but myself? Do I even have a point? WAS I, in fact, equivocating (I don’t think I was). How can I respond to this concept in the future, in a scientific manner as opposed to theology?
…
Pnord, your professor is an asshole, and presumes you’re an asshole.
If you feel like it, one day look up the use of the term “equivocating” in Shakespeare’s England. If you did not subscribe to the correct religious path, blocks of stone would be placed on your chest one by one until you thought better.
Well, I *am *actually an asshole, but that’s beside the point. q;}
My take: The brain is something that can be studied objectively, and includes “hardware” like neurons and gray matter, and “software” like language faculties, motor control and hallucinations.
The mind is entirely subjective. That’s it’s exclusive domain. Look up “What is it like to be a bat?” by Thomas Nagel. The mind is what is left when you take away anything objective and quantifiable. Things like “what is it like to be X?” or “how does it feel to be Y?”.
The brain is the instrument. The mind is the music.
The eerie part is that the instrument seems to play itself.
This is a wonderful argument.
This is what people say when they don’t have an argument and would like you to shut up before you make them look like even bigger fools.
It’s a fantastic point. Not equivocating in the slightest. I consider myself a materialist too, but a flexible one, and that’s only because of one reason: sentience.
Saying “Matter cannot think” is too reductionist. In fact, I can’t think of a more prime holistic example than the mind/brain conundrum. Reductionism will just give you a million pieces that make sense on that level, but it won’t necessarily shed any light on how it all comes together to form a “you”.
Like Stranger pointed out, we’re really in the dark ages when it comes to the mind. But not for lack of trying. There’s just no good theories that are convincing enough to anyone yet. Everything we know about us neurologically has only been arrived at, because we have a vast material understanding now on things like chemistry, biology, matter, etc. We have also made some great leaps in understanding behavior, perception, and cognition, but only to the degree of how the material affects the mind and vice versa.
But the mind, we don’t even know what it is. It’s entirely intangible, yet profoundly evident. it’s something that we don’t even know how to really approach quite yet.
Science truly has a ghost in the machine issue here. And I say “science”, because the mind, our consciousness, is undeniably part of the natural world but of such a unique matter than anything else.
I wish it were only the complexity that were the issue.
That’s how people assume our understanding of “pain” or “colour” will advance: it’s really complex, and as computing power increases we’ll be able to model such phenomena better and better.
In reality, detection of stimuli and choosing responses are complex but tractable problems.
But I wouldn’t know how to begin writing a program that feels pain on a crude or elementary level, or how I’d even know when I’d succeeded.
Best of the whole thread.
I do not know where your professor was coming from, but if the incident was really as you describe it he was doing a terrible job of teaching philosophy, and you do not appear to have been committing the logical fallacy of equivocation.
However, if you think that fact that alcohol makes people drunk, or that brain damage affects the mind, provides a knock-down refutation of Cartesian dualism, then you are mistaken. Descartes was not such a fool that he did not know that drunkenness exists, and that brain damage and other things that affect the brain will affect mental processes and capacities (a fact that has been known since ancient times), and his actual theory is designed to take account of such facts. Indeed, Descartes held that the brain plays a very large role in mental processes, and is almost entirely responsible for such things as memory, imagination, and emotion. His ideas about brain function were considerably more sophisticated than any that had come before, and, in many respects, are still the foundation of modern neuroscience. (In my personal opinion, although most neuroscientists vehemently reject Cartesian Dualism, and think that they are thereby free of Descartes’ influence, most of them are still far too strongly influenced, in more subtle ways, by other aspects of his ideas about the mind and brain.) Where Descartes differed from materialists was that he believed (and he had some pretty powerful arguments to back up this belief) that this could not be the whole story, and, in particular, that the powers of the brain alone could not account for consciousness or for rational thought (when human beings actually do manage to think rationally, as opposed to when they are drunk, or made irrational by excessive emotion, or whatever).
Refuting Cartesian dualism (as opposed to some caricatured, highly simplified version of it) is not at all an easy matter. That said, however, very few philosophers these days actually think it is true. Nearly all are some sort of materialist (there are many sorts). I thus think that it is rather unlikely that your professor was trying to persuade you of the truth of dualism (still less trying to get you to accept it without question, which would be absolutely inconsistent with the proper mission of a philosophy teacher). He was probably, though perhaps ineptly, trying to get his students to understand the (very real) power of the arguments in its favor, and also to understand why making too glib a dismissal of them is an obstacle, rather than a help, to progress toward a true scientific and materialistic understanding of the mind.
Your brain is physical. A sickness in the brain is usually a tumor or stroke.
Your mind is mental, and mental illness is a whole nother thing.
Absolutely false. Most, if not all, mental illnesses are caused by organic abnormalities of the brain, which is the reason drugs are, at least to some extent, efficacious in the treatment of them.
Serotonin reuptake inhibitors is now the drug of choice for depression, but other drugs for depression include the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Lithium is used for bipolar disorder because it reduces the mood-elevating effect of norepineprhine. Sedatives or muscle relaxants are used for anxiety.
Antipsychotic drugs are uses for psychoses, such as schizophrenia. These include four groups: penothiazines, butyrophenones, thioxanthenes,and rauwolfia alkaloids.
There are no drugs for the various personality disorders. These are character disorders which are established in the very early years as a result of early experiences and conditioning.