Re: [Futurework] RE: But where's the mind?

[Keith Hudson]

At 16:40 02/06/2003 -0700, you wrote:
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Hello Arthur,
Your remark about mind being a process that goes on in the brain echoed back at me in a meditative moment yesterday. You were wondering, Where is the mind?, and if indeed we have one. I really enjoy these kinds of questions, and ask that you consider the following:

Mind is quite apart from brain because you are free to change your mind moment to moment. You can do so because, unlike brain and body, it is unfettered by physical laws.
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How do you know you are free to change your mind from moment to moment? Brain studies show very clearly that electrical potential builds up in the relevant brain cells *before* you are conscious of taking a decision (and apparently exercising your freewill). This was a counter-intuitive discovery by Libet some 15 years ago of explosive significance to philosophy and has been more thoroughly investigated -- and confirmed -- than almost anything else in neuroscience
 
If the mind is unfettered by physical laws and outside their ambit, then how come you can think or say anything at all about it? Everything you think or say is governed by the neurons in your brain and these, in turn, are governed by exactly the same physical laws that govern every other activity.

If one persists in thinking of the mind as some sort of free-floating entity then you can have an infinity of different hypotheses about it and every single one of them can be thought to be true (if anybody believes you) simply because it can't be tested.

Keith Hudson

Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England