Mind Vs Brain

The Body

The body is a vehicle to interact with the world around us.

The body has limbs, muscles and senses to enable interaction.

The body has organs, systems and processes to support and power the limbs, muscles and senses.

The body has a controller to manipulate and control the organs, systems and processes > the brain.

Death occurs with brain failure; all other organs, systems and processes may fail provided they are not causative for the brain to fail. The heart may fail leading the brain to be deprived of oxygen and thus death occurs with the brain failing. Death representing the vehicle is no longer operational. Whilst life is said to continue post the death of the brain when the body is on a heart / lung machine; it is likely that the brain is not entirely non operational; as oxygen continues to be fed thanks to the life support machine; artificially maintaining oxygen and therefore the brain.

All seems to lead back to the brain being in control and the brain defining life and death.

Is the brain the mind

Should there be no mind or should the mind be an effect of the brain; then life as we know it likely ends upon death.

Should the brain control our every action as below:

1. > Actions our body engages in do so due to signals from our brain.
   
2. > Signals are created from our brain as an outcome of processing.
   
3. > Input to the processor comes from our senses.
   

Than we should only ever react.

Reactions can include emotions; i.e:

1. > My brain determines the stomach is empty and sends a signal to eat
   
2. > I see an object that has been determined through knowledge passed or experience to be food.
   
3. > I eat the the object; an enjoyment signal comes from its effect through the body and an emotion is created.
   

Or;

1. > I spend much time with one person.
   
2. > I grow to rely upon that person with many actions tied to that person
   
3. > As that person disappears and I accept the person disappearing many answers in the brain are now void, cannot be used and new answers must be
4. > found; creating the emotion of despair.
   

Reactions can include innovation and asking the big questions

The question why am I here? does not represent mind, in simple AI processes it can be recreated for AI to also ask the same question; i.e:

1. > Senses detect information
   
2. > Brain processes information; stores answers against reactions / emotions and sends signals
   
3. > I detect objects that look as I do;
   
4. > I build many answers with those objects;
   
5. > The object disappears; and as such I seek to find an answer;
   
6. > I use all senses to look as far; and collect as much sensory information to be processed in search of the answer.
   

All big questions can come of the above; should our brain be designed to seek answers as defensive / life giving / purpose mechanism. It does not mean I have a mind nor a conscious everything we do including debating and reading this content we do as our brain seeks an answer to preserve life and continual search.

The weirdness that leads to the question of is their a mind or consciousness; is not as widely suggested questions such as “Why am I here?”, “What is my purpose”; the weirdness is sitting in front of us; in fact the way this post was written gives rise to the weirdness; it is that fact that I have written this with a knowing of “I”.

Self realisation is not asking the question “Why am I here” it is simply stating “I”; the why here part can easily be explained as the design of our brain to seek answers.


The “I” part suggests one of two things:

1. a. The brain is aware of itself;
   
2. b. The brain is not I;
   

Choice may be a part of the brain; that enables reactions to not take place and determine the effect; emotions may be a part of the brain where signals are produced due to the information stored with emotion just a shadow or effect of processing; seeking more is the original primary purpose; innovation is not a sign of mind; however “I” or “Self realisation” is a sign of mind.

Despair over the death of “I” can be an effect of the brain; the brain wants the vehicle to continue as long as answers are left unanswered; it is again the knowing of “I” that does not fit with the brain.

The brain may have been programmed to know “I” to know itself as a defensive or other mechanism; though in this case if the brain creates I and we are all but brain; than a purpose seems lacking and with such a complex programmed life why would we be left to ponder I; for all but a laugh?

It seems to me that “I” is not from the brain; our brain prevents us from knowing I; as we grow older and wiser with knowledge of our material surroundings we actually become further away from I.

The brain is not “I”; we are just a vehicle “I” has plugged into with the brain as the controller.

a reply to: Kazzrip

My soul is my spirit it is not connected to my brain. MY brain is wear my smarts come from. My body is from what I eat. My soul is the soul of my fathers fathers father and his father before him.

We are all connected.

While there is no proof, there is some compelling scientific evidence for life after death. This is an excellent rabbit hole, by the way. I waited a long time for a second scientist to start replicating these experiments, and I was not disappointed.

consciouslifenews.com...

In case you're worried, there is NO hypnotic regression involved in any of these cases.

a reply to: Kazzrip

Hi Kazzrip.

Congrats on your first flag, star, and thread on ATS, in 10 years!! That's pretty amazing!.

Your text is deep, and will need to read a few more times before commenting, if the need to comment is felt.

a reply to: Kazzrip

In Vipassana retreat or deep meditation, one of the things coming to realization is there is no "I"... The brain is a mediator, just like the heart, in terms of functionality... I itself is nothing physical, and transplants are revealing that even if you replace the brain, there is still a sense of I... But if you look deep into it, you realize it's actually made up, through language, conditioning, and stories we keep telling ourselves.

My name is Joe. I am a dentist. I am a husband. I have 2 kids and a dog.

The above is not true, but a sense of I can be built around it and given an identity to play with.

But again, if you look deep into it... Am I my brain? My body? If am my body, which part of the body is I? Am I a dentist? A husband? Is that who I really am?

We are given an identity at birth, and we have risen to believe this identity to be real... The birth of the ego, and the attachment of it to people, things, bodily activities, etc, hence the identity is created around it.

You are right when you say "the brain prevents us from knowing I", the whole ego structure is terrified of the truth of itself... The idea that there is no "I" is deeply troubling the mind; therefore the majority of people will not be able to remove the filters of ego with all its conditionings and memory and see themselves for what they are.

In these moments we are free.

a reply to: Kazzrip

The ancient Romans thought that the centre of our emotions was in the liver.

Later, people believed it was the heart.

Now, most people think it is the brain (personally, such primitive function is more likely to be in the spine, brain stem or at a minimum be distributed throughout our nervous system).

The recent case of a French man who only had about 1/4 of the normal grey matter and yet was a normally functioning person suggests either that higher brain function is distributed throughout the nervous system or even exists beyond the limits of our nervous system.

a reply to: FuggleHop

MY brain is wear my smarts

"where" is this brain that is so smart that it wears a disguise? (just some grammar correction's for your smart mind.)

a reply to: chr0naut

The recent case of a French man who only had about 1/4 of the normal grey matter and yet was a normally functioning person suggests either thathigher brain function is distributed throughout the nervous system or even exists beyond the limits of our nervous system.

I would tend to agree with this....

and now there is also the brain-gut-emotion connection...

www.health.harvard.edu...

The gut-brain connection GI conditionsHave you ever had a "gut-wrenching" experience? Do certain situations make you "feel nauseous"? Have you ever felt "butterflies" in your stomach? We use these expressions for a reason. The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.

The brain has a direct effect on the stomach. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach's juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut. Therefore, a person's stomach or intestinal distress can be the cause or the product of anxiety, stress, or depression. That's because the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) system are intimately connected.

a reply to: Kazzrip

The brain is the record player the mind is the music.

In terms of spirit and soul I think it is delusion to think they exist. What makes us human is not invented by anyone. Everyone thinks they invented sex but each of us shares sexuality with every other person. If you can accept sexuality is shared then why not every other aspect of human character. Why we laugh or what we laugh at is not something we own or unique to us. I would argue the idea of ego that each of us has an experience after death is just more delusion. We live, that is our spirit, lives on in every other person still living in the human race. Human beings are the ant colony. And individual human being is just an ant. But every ant in the colony is important. I just think it is delusion to think we are different or unique in any way from everyone else. Everyone has the same fears, frustrations, and joys. If we were only able to recognize and see ourselves in other people, then maybe would would may it a priority to even try to alleviate all of the human suffering going on everyday. And the reason being someone else's suffering is my own suffering as well.

a reply to: Kazzrip

Ah, but science says, that everything in existence is a material of some sort. 'Tis does not matter that our individual minds can discern that beside the physical world there is something else. And worse, for the materialistic scientists is that there is a connection between the two. Not that the brain dreams up these other realms for its own amusement, but that other quality of something has entirely conjured us up.

Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality

We need to become vividly aware of our ecology, of our interdependence and virtual identity with all other forms of life which the divisive and emboxing methods of our current way of thought prevent us from experiencing. The so-called physical world and the so-called human body are a single process, differentiated only as the heart from the lungs or the head from the feet. In stodgy academic circles I refer to this kind of understanding as "ecological awareness." Elsewhere it would be called "cosmic consciousness" or "mystical experience."

The Piraha

The thing I find so interesting about the book and Everett’s views and findings are that he claims that the Piraha are by far and away the happiest people he has ever met. Their perception of space and time is directly influenced by their language, by the way they interpret the space around them into symbols, and because of this they are often thinking only in the immediate present, they do not worry about the future or dwell on the far past, they are contented in the here and now.

I would tend to agree with this....

and now there is also the brain-gut-emotion connection...

The Mind and Stomach at War: Stress and Abdominal Illness in Britain c.1939–1945

The popularity of concepts stressing the impact of the mind on the gastrointestinal tract also encouraged social scientists to make more broad-based statements about the relationship between the “ulcer type” and his environment. Most notably, in 1944, the pioneering social researcher Richard Titmuss composed a detailed statistical investigation of the problem with Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Morris of the Royal Army Medical Corps. They concluded that the economic patterns of unemployment and re-employment witnessed in the 1930s were in fact reflected in the epidemiological behaviour of peptic ulcer disease in that period. At the start of the decade, unemployment seemed to have led to a reduction in ulcer mortality as the death rate from the complaint had dropped in those areas particularly affected. However, as economic depression eased and unemployment declined, ulcer mortality rose sharply, apparently as a consequence of the return to work.

a reply to: TheConstruKctionofLight

Your exacly correct, ConstructKtionOfLite! The brain is like a cloak for the body enshrouding it in chrisslike perfection its easy to forget that the bible says god Made man in his image well hear I am, in my own god like perfection.

So when you come along with your chuberic avatar like cock of the walk, raising youre fingers to annoint and start correcting while inavertantly revealing that indeed the mind is the cloak of the week it makes it all so apparent that your true nature is that of an unsung underdog I cant help but want to hug you.

Now is it my body wanting to hug u or my mind. Well for that I suggest you study up on the philosophies.

originally posted by: Aliensun
a reply to: Kazzrip

Ah, but science says, that everything in existence is a material of some sort.

I'm not sure science "says" anything at all about that, but in any case, its impossible to prove the empirical world is the only world. Philosophy 101: Berkeley, Kant, etc.

The world we perceive is the product of our senses, ergo we have no idea of what we can't sense or what's beyond our perception, or what we can't rationally derive from it. And our perceptions are illusory and deceptive, for the most part. If there were another world, a "non-material" world, say, or a world of abstract forms and fundament, we would certainly be blind to it while we live.

Anyone who says they know that this is the only "reality" is a liar and a charlatan, plain and simple.

I disagree with this way of conceptualizing things.

Ultimately, what you call the "I", emerges, and is never really situated "outside", the activities of the physical-material continuum which gives rise to the "I".

Rather, look at it as a continuum, beginning diachronically and synchronically at the quark-gluon scale, and "emerging", at multiple "pure durations", in such a way as to concatenate each emergent level with the one above and beneath it.

I have charts/graphs for this, but can't post them online. So i'll explain the 'enigma' of mind-brain, or mind-body, as not really an enigma or a conflict, but a function of a incorrect metaphysical/conceptual framework which analyzes the matter in a syllogistic way.

Ontologically, the quark-gluon gives rise to a "higher" metaphysical property called the proton. I say "higher", because the mass of a proton is much greater than what constitutes it i.e. quark-gluon relations. Similarly, Protons/Neutrons, both made of quark-gluons, when entangled with electrons (another sub-atomic particle) give rise to an "atom". The atom is a stable regularity, just as the quark-gluon. In reality, all things are processual and dynamic, and if we talk of them being "things", what we really mean, scientifically speaking, is their regularity of behavior.

Heavy element atoms need a star too explode for them to stabilize at a certain distance from the hot plasma of hydrogen/helium behavior. These atoms are created by the system - in this case, the past fact of a stars-explosion and the laws of nucleogenesis. Time, here, is playing a role in creating new properties out of the "old".

Progress a step further, and atoms come together - only on planets which provide moderate temperature gradients - and molecules come together to form "autocatalytic loops", which are 'edge of chaos' processes which contain and transfer workable energy from one molecule to another within an enclosed phospholipid 'protocell' which sets a boundary between what is 'within' and what is 'without'.

See the progression here? It's cooperation, and emergence, as the "particulates" of matter, quarks, protons, atoms, etc, come together in larger and more complex combinations - increasing in size, while at the same generating a coherent "whole" at whatever scale the energetics self-organizes.

Autocatalytic loops progress to small cells (prokaryotes), and just like molecules interacting in such a way as to maintain coherent energy flow/transformation within itself and the systems beyond it, the archea - an ancient cell, is said to have eaten a bacteria, and in the process, integrated the bacterias genetic elements with it's own as it evolved a 'nucleus' filled with DNA/Protein, that was dynamically continuous with the former bacterial DNA - now 'mitochondria', as well as the external membranes and the proteins studded therein. The birth of the Eukaryote was really the birth of a structure that carried within itself a 'mini' energy factory i.e. mitochondria, which, being a former nitrogen/carbon eating bacteria, could breakdown the glucose molecule and generate a unit of energy (ATP/ADP) for cell processes.

I could go on and explain further, but my point is this: the mind and its dynamics is a FUNCTION of the neurodynamics of brain-processes, particularly as that relates to the quality of energy dissipation within the chemical/electrodynamic flow of the organisms structure, and its representation within the organisms body mind (it's affects/feelings) and how that information is used to guide its action/perception in the world, vis a vis the "salient objects" i.e. other Humans, who enliven our feelings and provoke identity-formation.

Consciousness ARISES within these dynamics, and takes off from there: its job is to mentally/psychodynamically understand its relations with others, and if it understands properly, it regulates the flow of energy (feeling) dynamics in such a way as to maximize internal freedom i.e. how one feels about things.

Mind is not simply hanging above the body without any causative/dynamical basis to its activity. No. Physical rules related to symmetry determine what we feel. Understanding and realizing the significance of your mind is ineluctably tied to understanding the meaning and language of your body's feeling dynamics.

Nice write up Kazz.

It hurts my brain just reading how much different information is in this thread. I understand that the Brain is similar to a mainframe. The central processing unit (CPU), and primary memory which we learn through repetition whether it be touch, taste, sight or odor. Like computers humans are no different we command it what to do and they do it, just like everything else that requires some sort of command. There is just too much going on beyond our skulls...My mind hurts just thinking about it now...

S&F