On the question of whether or not we can be certain of the explicit
distinction between intangible, theoretical concepts and their commonly paired,
physical and scientifically validated pairings.
I'd apologize for the typo, but just as anything could have happened,
including the right grammar, my personalized wave form collapsed into the “wrong”
outcome just as I was typing, and you know that WF collapses don’t
negotiate. But the real trouble started when
my Mind studied Latin, and my Brain did not, and as “luck” would have it, it
seems that Brains control fingers not minds, so I will save my fingers the
embarrassment of telling them about their apparent accidental genesis of a word
that never actually died with the rest of the language.....
So to address a few comments:
1)
Do we really have the option to really think out
of language? Yes.*
2)
How must we consider the co-existence of the
Brain and Mind? Yes. **
(* **just consider everything from here on a conjoined footnote [feetnote?])
Let’s start with the inevitable 2 questions, in the form of a little
challenge question:
Which of the following statements is factually correct?
1. The Brain is the medium in which the Mind is contained
2. The Body is the medium in which the Soul is contained
When our "mind wanders” does it wander beyond the confines of our
physical brain?
Is it the brain that is responsible for intangibles such as
self-awareness, or is this state of meta-cognition the result of a mind that
wandered beyond the confines of the brain, and looked back down (or sideways,
or up I suppose) and realized that this "out of brain experience" was
something that it was experiencing independent of its cerebral (but only occasional?)
encasement?
When the mind returned from its meta-marauding within the infinity of
timeless space, how would the mind explain to the stay-at-home brain what it
had seen, heard, experienced, and reasoned?
I would reckon that the lexicon that defines the brain’s ability to
communicate with the mind is a mere fraction of the minds lexicon to
communicate with anything (or anyone, etc.). So, how might the mind bring the brain up to
speed on what it has recently been experiencing? I don’t suppose it would, any more than we
might try to explain to our car the nuances of the movie we just watched.
Given the almost impossibility (if we believe that brain and mind are
not the same) of the Mind using a common lexicon or language to form a singular
union with the brain such that “mindful only” experiences could be adequately
relayed to the brain such that the brain could share the common understanding
of the mindful experience, I’m heading for my fallback position and will
propose that within the cerebral lexicon, mindful experiences are quite often (but
not always) ineffable.
I think the good news is that as Google is currently discovering with
house numbers, and as we have long known about the functioning of skilled readers
(both human and not), it is quite often the Sensorially perceived
characteristics of an object (including, lamps, words, numbers, etc.) that impart
meaning within the intellectual or instinctual processors pre-supposed to exist
tidily within our heads (ok, skulls….).
Part II
Many forms of recognition, communication and understanding are, through
science, being found to be infinitely more efficient in transference when we
consider form over lexicological constructions.
In other words, innovations in recognition (the precursor to
understanding?) sciences are forcing a perceptual regression as fast as
possible, and the results are striking. Someone
once said that “a picture speaks a thousand words”, but, why in fact do we
actually need a thousand words, if we can glean all the information we need
from just looking at the picture? Well,
I suppose we could say that our minds comprehend the sensory input, but as of
yet, we (humans) don’t seem to have figured out a way to communicate
mind-to-mind, so we must resolve to get our brains to start issuing
physiological commands until all of those 1,000 words have been spoken, of
course with no guarantee that we used the right 1,000 words such that our
listener’s mind can replicate the same picture observed by the speaker.
But “innovative” technologies all around us today are learning and communicating
using shapes as the atomic level of communication, not the itty little bits of
letters, numbers, etc. that produce the shape.
Does a fluent reader of the English language really “read” each letter
of a word in order to grasp the meaning? Of course not. And this is why Google
can derive every house number in France within 1 hour…..
I’m sure I’m already passed my allocations of characters, but the last
thing I will say, is that if the mind and brain are a singular entity, sharing
concurrently the same environmental characteristics of sound, vision, touch, feel,
taste, etc.: is it the Mind or Brain that
suddenly realizes on the 27th ring that the phone is ringing? It has been suggested that the “mind can
wander”, possibly too far away from the phone to hear it, but it’s a much more
complicated matter I think, to suggest that the brain may be shadowing the mind
on its extra-cranial wanderings. But the
question remains open: was it the Mind or Brain that didn’t hear the phone and
then did?
But for just a moment (never trust me when I say “the last thing I will
say is…”) let’s consider my original challenge concerning the Brain/Mind vs
Body/Soul: maybe we could say that the
Mind and Soul, both on roughly equal scientific footings given the shared lack
of irrefutable proof of their individual existences, are actual the more
correct pairing, as Body and Brain seem to fit together in a nice, tangible and
scientifically defined sort of way.
Now my last question is very simple: without introducing any manner of
religion-based faith, prove this equation: Human = (Mind + Brain + Body + Soul)
I do not believe I have clouded the issue of Mind vs Brain by
introducing the Body/Soul paradigm. My
own Mind is telling me that there are no shortcuts here, and the Body/Soul
question lies, if not in our critical path to answering the Brain/Mind
question, it sure as heck is trying to get in my way of answering the original
question, and seeing as how my Mind is also telling me that it has had quite a
few more life experiences( and time to consider them) than my brain, I would in
my own mind anyway, likely be considered unwise to ignore myself on this
occasion.
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