What is mind? What is consciousness? There seems to be no single answer that explains the phenomenon of mind. The contemporary views of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and cybernetics all come up with different interpretations of mind and consciousness.
It is a bit ironic that something we claim to possess is so hard to explain. Obviously mind cannot be an object of itself. Or can it? If we should one day understand the chemical and electrical processes in the brain completely, would this explain mind? Would this understanding account for all faculties including intelligence, consciousness, emotion, and volition?
On the following pages we will try to give some possible answers to this question. On the topic of consciousness, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland once wrote: "Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it." - Hopefully this won’t keep you from reading on.
Epistemology and psychology.
The investigation of mind is closely related to the field of epistemology, the part of philosophy that deals with knowledge and whose principal question is: "What can we know?" Epistemology is not so much preoccupied with the process of accumulating knowledge, but with the validity of knowledge and how we can achieve certainty about it. It includes the branch of philosophy that the ancients called logic, which deals with language and thought. Bertrand Russell once remarked tellingly that the theory of knowledge is a product of doubt. Things seem to speak in favour of Russel's view – most philosophers find it easier to determine what we cannot know rather than what we can know. Perhaps the theory of knowledge should then be called "theory of ignorance."
The other question about knowledge is: "How do we know?" This question pertains to the mechanics of sensation, perception, cognition, memory, and physical brain processes. It also touches upon language and thought, but it takes a more scientific approach to these issues. The latter question is primarily asked by psychologists and neuroscientists, although philosophers recently took a renewed interest in the workings of the brain. Since both approaches are beneficial in their own way, we shall not limit ourselves to a particular one.
Defining mind.
On the surface, the attempt to define mind seems superfluous, since it is so fundamental to us. However, the explicit verbalisation of an intuitive understanding of mind is fairly difficult, because it requires us to transform the subjective first-person experience into an objective third-person description.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines mind as follows: "The collective conscious and unconscious processes in a sentient organism that direct and influence mental and physical behaviour." This definition attributes mind to sentient organisms and identifies it with processes that control behaviour. According to the view of contemporary science, these are brain and nerve processes, cognition, motor, and sensory processes.
The faculties of mind.
The scientific definition is in agreement with the physicalist view of mind that equates mental phenomena with neuronal activity. The definition is also in agreement with the functionalist view of psychology, which frequently divides mind into distinct faculties (as shown on the right) and then investigates those faculties individually. Some of these functions can be mapped to particular brain areas.
Dividing mind into faculties involves a great deal of abstraction, because in reality there are no clear boundaries between them. For example, the simple process of catching a ball involves sensation, cognition, and reasoning processes without there being a clear separation between the single actions of seeing the ball, calculating its speed and angle, and coordinating body movements.
Another more serious problem is that the scientific definition makes no reference to conscious experience and its subjective qualities. It is not easy to see how the experience of sensations and feelings could be part of the physical world. For example, how can emotions, such as love (affection, attraction) and hate (aversion, repulsion) which we seem to share with some animals, be described in terms of physical structures and processes?
Is the scientific definition viable in philosophy?
Perhaps it is necessary to ask whether science is capable of explaining mind at all.
Unfortunately the scientific definition falls short of one important quality: spirit. The scientific view is difficult to apply, for instance, in the context of sociology where we speak of the mental qualities of a group or population (the nation's mind, group mind, team spirit). It is also difficult to apply in the context of religion, where mind and spirit are associated with transcendental concepts such as the immortal soul, the world mind, the holy spirit, etc.
The materialist notion of mind is possibly too limited for a general philosophical discourse. It would be extremely difficult to discuss topics that involve metaphysical, ontological, and phenomenological accounts of mind. A purely materialist understanding of mind would simply evade these topics. More exotic fields of knowledge, such as theology, religion, and parapsychology do not harmonise with the scientific view of mind either. Hence, we shall postpone further attempts to define mind and as yet allow the largest possible meaning of the word, perhaps in the sense of the German word "Geist", which means both mind and spirit.
Philosophy of mind.
The philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that deals with mind and consciousness. It falls outside the four classical branches, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, but it relates especially to the first two. The ancients did not see it as a separate discipline, although the systematic investigation of certain aspects of mind began with the study of reason in Plato and Aristotle. During the middle ages, the philosophy of mind lingered within the confines of Christian epistemology. Important theoretical advances began to take shape only in the 17th century with Descartes and Hobbes. The philosophy of mind flourished during the late 18th and 19th century (Hegel, Darwin, Wundt, James) just before it spawned psychology, while the philosophical currents of the time flowed into the schools of phenomenology and existentialism. Psychology has ruled the field for some time during the 20th century, however, the philosophy of mind experienced a small renaissance lately due to the appearance of computer technology and other new disciplines such as cybernetics and the neurosciences. These developments brought up the question whether a machine can emulate mind and whether it can become conscious.
