I wrote: "what comes into your head [when you hear a "word"-sound] are solely bits of memory retrieved and mosaicked by your racy brain as it frisks the familiar sound, and creates your me-meaning."
Lew wrote: "Cheerskep's model seems good enough to me with the possible objection that one can't quite characterize the brain as an independently thinking part of the mind. Even this can be answered, I think. I'd also like to thank him for my "racy, frisky" brain. Sometimes I wonder." Lew's remark rightly focuses us on the cataract of different notion flowing through our consciousness as we use the words 'brain' and 'mind'. With 'brain' I tend to have in mind the pullulating lump of neural links, the "meat", inside my skull. A "brain injury" is, to me, a physical event. 'Mind' is much fuzzier. I'm a dualist. I won't try to defend that position here; I'll only try to convey an incomplete, colorful and effectively indefensible description of the position. Broadly, I accept that there is a physical brain, but I cannot shake the belief that there is also a non-physical entity-of-sorts - consciousnesness: awareness, waking thoughts, feelings, sensations. The Nobelist Gerald Edelman defines human consciousness as being: "... what you lose on entering a dreamless deep sleep ... deep anesthesia or coma ... what you regain after emerging from these states. [The] experience of a unitary scene composed variably of sensory responses ... memories ... situatedness ... " I'll add to Edelman's effort all "potential" consciousness - what's often referred to as the "subconscious" or "unconscious". And to this conglomerate of "sciousness" I'll further add the C.O.O. - the Chief Operating Officer of the conglomerate - the "you" that Edelman talks of falling into a deep and dreamless sleep. (To be fair to Edelman, I should report the man rejects dualism! The "physicalist" would evidently point to a wriggling neuron in my brain and say, "That's your pain." To which I would have the standard reply "Like hell it is! That may be some sort of physical correlative, but it's even less my pain than the light is the light-bulb." ((And I'd go on to use other feckless figurative efforts to convey my dualist conviction.))) In sum, for me the mind is (fuzzily) the sum of the non-physical "thinking/feeling/imagining/etc" stuff that is my "awareness". All of this is by way of saying nay when Lew characterizes me as believing "the brain is an independently thinking part of the mind". If anything, it's more the other way around.
