Mind is a concept developed by self-conscious humans trying to
understand what is the self that is conscious and how does that self
relate to its perceived world. Most broadly, mind is the organized
totality of the mental processes of an organism and the structural and
functional components on which they depend. Taken more narrowly, as it
often is in scientific studies, mind denotes only cognitive activities
and functions, such as perceiving, attending, thinking, problem solving,
language, learning, and memory. Aspects of mind are also attributed to
complex animals, which are commonly considered to be conscious. Studies
in recent decades suggest strongly that the great apes have a level of
self-consciousness as well.
Philosophers have long sought to understand what is mind and its
relationship to matter and the body. The Greek philosophers Plato and
Aristotle between them defined the poles (monism and dualism) of much of
the later discussion in the Western world on the question of mind—and
much of the ambiguity as well. Based on his world model that the
perceived world is only a shadow of the real world of ideal Forms,
Plato, a dualist, conceived of mind (or reason) as the facet of the
tripartite soul that can know the Forms. The soul existed independent of
the body, and its highest aspect, mind, was immortal. Aristotle,
apparently both a monist and a dualist, insisted in The Soul that
soul was unitary, that soul and body are aspects of one living thing,
and that soul extends into all living things. Yet in other writings from
another period of his life, Aristotle expressed the dualistic view that
the knowing function of the human soul, the mind, is distinctively
immaterial and eternal.
Saint Augustine adapted from the Neoplatonism of his time the dualist
view of soul as being immaterial but acting through the body. He linked
mind and soul closely in meaning. Some 900 years later, in an era of
recovering the wisdom of Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas identified the
species, man, as being the composite substance of body and soul (or
mind), with soul giving form to body, a monistic position somewhat
similar to Aristotle's. Yet Aquinas also adopted a dualism regarding the
rational soul, which he considered to be immortal. Christian views
after Aquinas have diverged to cover a wide spectrum, but generally they
tend to focus on soul instead of mind, with soul referring to an
immaterial essence and core of human identity and to the seat of reason,
will, conscience, and higher emotions.
Rene Descartes established the clear mind-body dualism that has
dominated the thought of the modern West. He introduced two assertions:
First, that mind and soul are the same and that henceforth he would use
the term mind and dispense with the term soul; Second, that mind and
body were two distinct substances, one immaterial and one material, and
the two existed independent of each other except for one point of
interaction in the human brain.
In the East, quite different theories related to mind were discussed and
developed by Adi Shankara, Siddhārtha Gautama, and other ancient Indian
philosophers, as well as by Chinese scholars.
As psychology became a science starting in the late nineteenth century
and blossomed into a major scientific discipline in the twentieth
century, the prevailing view in the scientific community came to be
variants of physicalism with the assumption that all the functions
attributed to mind are in one way or another derivative from activities
of the brain. Countering this mainstream view, a small group of
neuroscientists has persisted in searching for evidence suggesting the
possibility of a human mind existing and operating apart from the brain.
In the late twentieth century as diverse technologies related to
studying the mind and body have been steadily improved, evidence has
emerged suggesting such radical concepts as: the mind should be
associated not only with the brain but with the whole body; and the
heart may be a center of consciousness complementing the brain.
Philosophical Perspectives
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature
of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties,
consciousness and their relationship to the physical body. The mind-body problem,
i.e., the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the
central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues
concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to
the physical body.
Stated briefly, the mind-body problem is as follows: we believe
ourselves to exist as both a physical body and a mind, and that these
stand in some intimate relation. Our mind is involved in mental
decisions giving rise to physical actions, and physical events (such as a
finger being cut) give rise to mental events (such as a feeling of
pain). One possible explanation for this correlation of mental functions
and physical body experience is that the mind, which includes my sense
of self, is simply a product of the physical brain. On the other hand,
the mind appears to possess features that no physical body does,
including consciousness and simplicity (or unitary identity). Indeed,
further reflection might lead us to conclude that the mind is entirely
different from the body. Yet if that is correct, it is hard to see how
mind and body could also have the intimate relation that they do have.
Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought
that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism is the position
that mind and body are separate from each other in some fundamental way.
It can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, but it was most precisely
formulated by René Descartes in the seventeenth century. Substance dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property dualists
maintain that the mind is or constitutively involves a group of
independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to
physical properties of the brain, but that it is not a distinct
substance.
Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically
distinct kinds of entities. This view appears to have first been
advocated in Western Philosophy by Parmenides in the fifth century
B.C.E. and was later espoused by the great seventeenth Century
rationalist Baruch Spinoza. One type of monist, physicalists,
argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and
that the mind can in principle be explained in terms of these entities.
On the other hand, idealists maintain that the mind (along with
its perceptions, thoughts, etc.) is all that exists and that the
external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the
mind. Finally, neutral monists adhere to the position that there
is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are
properties of this substance. The most common monisms in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries have all been variations of physicalism;
these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous
monism and functionalism.
Many modern philosophers of mind can be sorted into reductive vs. non-reductive varieties of physicalism, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. Reductive physicalists
assert that all mental states and properties will eventually be
explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states. Non-reductive physicalists argue that although the brain is all there is
to the mind, the predicates and vocabulary used in mental descriptions
and explanations are indispensable, and cannot be reduced to the
language and lower-level explanations of physical science. These
approaches have been especially influential in the sciences,
particularly in the fields of sociobiology, computer science,
evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences. Other
philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges
the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct.
Continued neuroscientific progress has helped to clarify some of these
issues. However, they are far from having been resolved, and modern
philosophers of mind continue to ask how the subjective qualities and
the intentionality (aboutness) of mental states and properties can be
explained using the terms of the natural sciences.
Mental faculties
Plato in his various writings proposed different views of the mind, but
he consistently held the view that mind is only one aspect of the soul.
While he emphasized that the soul is unitary, he also argued that the
soul has different aspects, one rational and the other irrational and
comprising desires and appetites. The mind was the rational or reasoning
aspect of soul. Since then, concepts and definitions of soul and of
mind have varied widely as philosophers (and, more recently,
psychologists) have worked to delineate the various functions,
faculties, and aspects of the mind.
One useful pair of categories is rationalism and empiricism, which in
general represent two broad streams of philosophy looking at the
phenomena of the sense of self that engages in thinking, sensing,
feeling, deciding, and acting. Rationalists, represented by Plato,
Descartes, and Leibniz, tend to start with a system of metaphysical
assumptions and then develop within that context their model of the
human mind in which the ability to engage in abstract reasoning and
mathematics is considered indicative of the mind's faculty of 'reason'
by which truth can be recognized. By contrast, the tradition known as
empiricism (perhaps most famously exemplified by John Locke and David
Hume) aims to start with no metaphysical assumptions and build a model
of the world and of the mind based on experiences of external and
internal sensations.
Consideration of the mental faculties representing how the world is (such as belief and knowledge) and those representing how the world in some sense should be
(such as desire) receive differing priority and value according to the
thinker considering them. Plato, for instance, saw the desire for
knowledge as emanating from reason, the highest of faculties, while Kant
explicitly assigned pure moral motivation to the faculty of reason.
A Science of the Mind
Psychology is the study of human behavior and the mind. Originating as
an area of philosophy, psychology emerged as a distinct scientific
discipline with the establishment of the first laboratory of
experimental psychology in Germany in 1879. As both an academic and
applied discipline, psychology involves the scientific study of mental
processes such as perception, cognition, emotion, and personality, as
well as environmental influences from the society and culture, and
interpersonal relationships. Psychology also refers to the application
of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including
problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental health
problems.
Psychology differs from the other social sciences (e.g., anthropology,
economics, political science, and sociology) due to its focus on
experimentation at the scale of the individual, as opposed to groups or
institutions. Historically, psychology, beginning from a dualistic
position, differed from biology and neuroscience in that it was
primarily concerned with mind rather than brain. Modern psychological
science, in contrast, incorporates physiological and neurological
processes into its conceptions of perception, cognition, behavior, and
mental disorders.
The field of psychology can be viewed as comprising three aspects of
mind—cognition, affect, and conation—in which cognition concerns coming
to know and understand, affect concerns emotional aspects of
interpreting and responding to knowledge or information, and conation
concerns choice and intention in motivation. In comparison with
cognition and affect, whose implications for education have been well
developed and implemented into education in the US, conation, important
for self-direction and self-regulation, is the least well developed and
implemented of the three.
The Brain and the Mind
The "mind-body problem" concerning the explanation of the relationship,
if any, between minds, or mental processes, and bodily states or
processes is important not only to philosophy but also to the sciences,
including psychology, robotics, and artificial intelligence. The
question of how mind and brain are related remains unanswered after more
than a century of investing ever larger amounts of resources in the
development and use of ever more sophisticated technologies for studying
the brain.
The brain is defined as the physical and biological matter contained
within the skull, responsible for all electrochemical neuronal
processes. The mind, however, is seen in terms of mental attributes,
such as beliefs, desires, attention, visual cognition, awareness,
language, free choice, mental imagery, and sense of self and unitary
identity. Concepts of mind remain greatly varied into the twenty-first
century as the different mind concepts are tied to persistent differing
views of the nature of the world. Outside the research laboratories and
academic institutions, an implicit dualism—assuming that "mental"
phenomena are, in some respects, "non-physical" (distinct from the
body)—prevails.
Far from uniform, these dualistic views range across a wide spectrum.
Some adhere to metaphysically dualistic approaches in which the mind
exists independently of the brain in some way, such as a soul,
epiphenomenon, or emergent phenomenon. Other dualistic views maintain
that the mind is a distinct physical phenomenon, such as an
electromagnetic field or a quantum effect. Some envision a physical mind
mirroring the physical body and guiding its instinctual activities and
development, while adding the concept for humans of a spiritual mind
that mirrors a spiritual body and including aspects like philosophical
and religious thought.
Some materialists believe that mentality is equivalent to behavior or
function or, in the case of computationalists and strong AI theorists,
computer software (with the brain playing the role of hardware).
Idealism, the belief that all is mind, still has some adherents. At the
other extreme, eliminative materialists believe that minds do not exist
at all, and that mentalistic language will be replaced by neurological
terminology.
One Nobel prize winning neuroscientist, Sir John Eccles (1903-1997) was a
dualist interactionist believing that the human mind and brain are
separate entities. In searching for a mechanism by which mind and brain
could reasonably interact, that is without violating the law of
conservation of energy, he formulated the hypothesis that the
interaction must occur through some kind of quantum level mechanism and a
corresponding quantum level structure in the brain. His last book,
published in 1994, discloses that he was finally able to propose,
together with a quantum physicist, just such an hypothesis. It involves a
quantum level effect on the probability that neurotransmitters will be
released across some of the brain's trillions of synapses.
Artificial intelligence
The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to "the science and
engineering of making intelligent machines". It can also refer to
intelligence as exhibited by an artificial (man-made, non-natural, manufactured)
entity. AI is studied in overlapping fields of computer science,
psychology, neuroscience and engineering, dealing with intelligent
behavior, learning, and adaptation, and usually developed using
customized machines or computers. One of the biggest difficulties with
AI is that of comprehension. Many devices have been created that can do
amazing things, but critics of AI claim that no actual comprehension by
the AI machine has taken place.
The debate about the nature of the mind is relevant to the development
of artificial intelligence. If the mind is a thing separate from the
brain or higher than the functioning of the brain, then it would seem to
be impossible to recreate mind within a machine. If, on the other hand,
the mind is no more than the aggregated functions of the brain, then,
in theory, it would be possible to create a machine with a recognizable
mind (though possibly only with computers much different from today's),
by simple virtue of the fact that such a machine already exists in the
form of the human brain.
Religious Perspectives
Various religious traditions have contributed unique perspectives on the
nature of mind. In many traditions, especially mystical traditions,
overcoming the ego is considered a worthy spiritual goal.
Judaism sees the human mind as one of the great wonders of Yahweh's
creation. Christianity has tended to see the mind as distinct from the
soul (Greek nous) and sometimes further distinguished from the
spirit. Western esoteric traditions sometimes refer to a mental body
that exists on a plane other than the physical.
Hinduism's various philosophical schools have debated whether the human soul (Sanskrit atman) is distinct from, or identical to, Brahman,
the divine reality. Buddhism attempted to break with such metaphysical
speculation, and posited that there is actually no distinct thing as a
human being, who merely consists of five aggregates, or skandas.
The Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo attempted to unite the Eastern
and Western psychological traditions with his integral psychology, as
have many philosophers and New religious movements.
Taoism sees the human being as contiguous with natural forces, and the
mind as not separate from the body. Confucianism sees the mind, like the
body, as inherently perfectible.
Mental Health
By analogy with the health of the body, one can speak metaphorically of a
state of health of the mind, or mental health. Mental health has
typically been defined in terms of the emotional and psychological
well-being needed to function in society and meet the ordinary demands
of everyday life. According to the World Health Organization (WHO),
there is no one "official" definition of mental health. Cultural
differences, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories
all affect how "mental health" is defined. In general, most experts
agree that "mental health" and "mental illness" are not opposites. In
other words, the absence of a recognized mental disorder is not
necessarily an indicator of mental health.
One way to think about mental health is by looking at how effectively
and successfully a person functions. Feeling capable and competent;
being able to handle normal levels of stress, maintaining satisfying
relationships, and leading an independent life; and being able to
"bounce back," or recover from difficult situations, are all signs of
mental health.
Psychotherapy is an interpersonal, relational intervention used by
trained psychotherapists to aid clients in problems of living. This
usually includes increasing the individual sense of well-being and
reducing subjective discomforting experience. Psychotherapists employ a
range of techniques, such as dialogue, communication, and behavior
change, that support experiential relationship building in order to
improve the mental health of a client or patient, or to improve group
relationships (such as in a family). Most forms of psychotherapy use
only spoken conversation, though some also use various other forms of
communication such as the written word, art, drama, narrative story, or
therapeutic touch. Psychotherapy occurs within a structured encounter
between a trained therapist and client(s). Purposeful, theoretically
based psychotherapy began in the 19th century with psychoanalysis; since
then, scores of other approaches have been developed and continue to be
created.
The Future of the Mind
Mind is one of a cluster of related concepts—including self, identity,
soul, spirit, consciousness, reason, emotion, heart, appetites
(desires), will, and body—whose definitions and boundaries are highly
interdependent amongst themselves and at the same time highly culture
dependent. A culture that prioritizes reason and intellect as
foundations of knowledge, for example, will have a fundamentally
different concept of mind from that of a culture that prioritizes silent
meditation and the stilling of all rational thought as a foundation for
knowing truth. As convergence of world cultures and scientific studies
of the brain both continue, the question of what is the mind seems
likely to remain unanswered and disputed. Any view of the mind that aims
to be universal will need to account for: the persistent and widespread
accounts of perception beyond the physical senses; increasingly strong
evidence that mind is intimately at one with the body through the
integrated nervous, immune, and endocrine systems; and that the physical
heart is a seat of consciousness with the capacity to influence the
functioning of the brain.
Parapsychology
Some views of the mind are grounded in anomalous experiences—reported
persistently through history and throughout the world—of perceptions
attained without use of the physical senses. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology,
parapsychology is the systematic study of alleged psychological
phenomena involving the transfer of information or energy that cannot be
explained in terms of presently known scientific data or laws. The
types of phenomena studied—usually one of the various forms of
clairvoyance or telepathy—are capacities of extrasensory perception
whose proven existence would likely add strong support to the dualistic
views of mind and require a radical reconfiguration of the scientific
models of the mind and mental function.
The scientific reality of parapsychological phenomena and the validity
of scientific parapsychological research is a matter of frequent dispute
and criticism. The field is regarded by critics as a pseudoscience.
Parapsychologists, in turn, say that parapsychological research is
scientifically rigorous. Despite criticisms, academic institutions in
the U.S. and in Britain conduct research on the topic, employing
laboratory methodologies and statistical techniques. The
Parapsychological Association is the leading association for
parapsychologists and has been a member of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science since 1969.
The bodymind model
Models of the relation between mind and body depend significantly on the
best understanding of the body, which, has progressed from observation
of the gross structures—such as the brain, organs, muscles, bones, and
the large blood vessels—revealed through dissection, to finer and finer
details of structure down to the cellular and subcellular levels. In
parallel, studies of the dynamic processes operating in the body at
those different levels have also advanced. Through these complementary
studies, clear models of different systems of the body have been
developed. These systems include, the brain and nervous system, the
endocrine system, the immune system, the digestive system, the blood
system, and the skeletal. And through all of these discoveries the
deliberations about the mind and body relationship have continued, often
with the assumption that the mind, whatever it may be, is in some way
correlated with the brain.
Research in the last two decades brings into question that presumed
exclusive association of mind and brain, based on the discovery that
molecules called neuroeptides affect emotion, mood, health, and memory.
The neuropeptides are secreted by such different body components as the
brain, gut, and gonads. Then the neuropeptides circulate in the blood
until they bond to a receptor on a cell that may be in any of a
multitude of locations, including the brain, gut, gonads, immune cells,
or ganglia where nerves and clusters of cells converge at strategic
locations throughout the body. Emotions may be felt throughout the body
as the molecules of emotion are secreted and then captured by particular
cells. Memories associated with emotions seem also to be coded in the
body at the ganglia.
Even the narrow definition of mind includes cognitive activities and
functions, such as perceiving, attending, thinking, problem solving,
language, learning, and memory. The growing evidence from neuropeptides
circulating in the blood suggests a distribution of aspects of these
functions into the body rather than their exclusive association with the
brain. Such discoveries call into question the traditional images of
both the brain as the singular control center of the body and of the
mind as being exclusively associated with the brain, and point toward a
new model of an integrated bodymind.
Heart mind
The heart is by far the most powerful organ in the body, emitting
electromagnetic signals five thousand times more powerful than those of
the brain. Unlike cells in the rest of the body, the billions of cells
in the heart each pulsate individually and also in concert collectively.
"Wisdom of the heart" and "knowing in my heart" are expressions found
in many cultures.
A new field of cardio-energetics operates from the basic premise that
instead of the brain, the heart is the site of a human being's most
basic feelings, thoughts, dreams, and fears. One might say that heart
and brain in some way share the locus that is mind. While the
perspective of heart would be one of a mind partnership with the brain,
the brain perspective would be more likely to dominate any relationship
with the heart. Like the brain, gut, and gonads, the heart also is also
the site of receptors for and secretion of key neurotransmitters. The
heart has its own center of neurons.
Such factors as these and others are coming under close scrutiny because
of the strong evidence that in some cases of heart transplant the heart
recipient undergoes significant changes in personality, habits, and
preferences, taking on characteristics of the heart donor. One example
of many is of a young Hispanic man who received a heart transplant. The
wife of the heart donor used the word "copacetic" when she met the heart
recipient and placed her hand on his chest inside which her husband's
heart was beating. The young man's mother then recounted that her son
had started using "copacetic" regularly after the transplant, even
though it is not a Spanish word and her son had not previously known it.