What is mind?
Posted Under: mind, philosophy, psychology, spirituality
There’s an old spiritual joke:
What is mind? No mater.
What is mater? never mind.
Many years ago when I was doing research in the biochemistry of the brain and was thinking about consciousness and the brain (mind/body problem) I rejected most of the philosophical and scientific answers to the qwuestion as being either dualistic (say psychophysical paralelism) or sweeping the whole issue under the rug (epiphenomenalism).
Some behaviorists went as far as actually denying the existence of consciousness. To them only external "objective" behavior had any reality and they totally denied the existence of a subjective universe. To take the mater to the other extreme the solipsists denied the existence of an external world.
Another problem was the emergence problem. If the mind emerged at some point in evolution what happened before then? There were also issues of quantum mechanics with the observer effect. In this reading od quantum mechanics consciousness collapses the quantum uncertainty and if consciousness was an emergent phenomenon, then the whole universe would be Schrodinger’s cat experiment from big bang until the emergence of the first consciousness….
So my solution was to believe that consciousness is an intrinsic property of mater and there is only a single consciousness (hence the I am meditation I wrote about recently).
As time went on and I studied more philosophy and thought about the meaning of quantum mechanics I became more spiritual. One day at the Philosophical Research Society I mentioned that I believed consciousness is a basic property of matter (like electromagnetism, gravity, the week and strong nuclear forces). The lecturer asked, "How do you know that materiality is not a property of consciousness.
And my answer is that I don’t know. This whole thing reminds me of Alan Watt’s statement that the Earth peoples the same way as the apple tree apples….
This morning I was reading a wonderful a book: The Enlightened Heart by Stephen Mitchell 
Mind is everything; mind is nothing. Mind creates time and space, mind contains a billion galaxies, mind lifts a spoon of porridge to its mouth at breakfast. Mind islife and death. Mind is God and the devil; mind is you and I…
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