Greta wrote:Belinda wrote:One of the more useful ideas about mind is that mind and brain are the same i.e. mind and brain are identical but viewed from two aspects, the subjective and the objective aspects of the same.
It's true we don't have a mind if we don't have a functioning brain, but we don't have a mind without all the other body parts either. Increasingly the gut is being found to be influential, and often a pivotal influence, in all areas of our being. No doubt other organs also have varying influences on our personality and tastes.
Even a whole body approach to mind is limited because minds can't persist without external stimuli; they atrophy like a digestive system denied food. So the shifting environment available to our senses needs to also be included as constituents of minds. That makes a mind a shifting field of highly variable, relatively patterned and systematised perceptions moving through time and space, with the nucleus of that field perhaps being the brain or the gut (since in evolution metabolisms preceded brains). That field naturally includes the range of all senses as well as perception of other "mind fields" (often they can feel more like
mine fields
.
The active component of the mind is in the filtering of what's "out there". It comprises range, direction, intensity and exclusivity of focus.
Re mind/brain and mind/other body parts, environment, etc., I think it's important to make a distinction between identity--which is what mind/brain is, and influence, preconditions, necessities for functioning, etc.
Re influence, preconditions, necessities for functioning, etc., everything in the world is connected if you just go enough steps for it--it's a bit like the "Six Degrees" games.
And for example, kitchen ovens/stoves can't exist if we don't have something like steel or iron, gas or electricity or coal etc. to heat them, floors or solid ground to support them--and we can go on and on and connect all sorts of things to kitchen ovens/stoves, things that are preconditions for them, things that influence them, including stuff we spill on them while we're cooking, things that are necessities for them, and so on.
BUT, it doesn't make sense to say that the floor, or electricity or gas in the lines outside your house, or the pot you made pasta in, etc. IS a costituent of an oven/stove. It's definitely the case that the topological boundaries of the oven/stove are fuzzy, and maybe some of those other things can become part of the oven/stove--for example, maybe food you dropped on it will become permanently bound to it, or change the chemical makeup of the surface or something, but a lot of contemporary "dynamic systems"-type talk seems to want to blur kinds to a point where everything would basically be everything (again, as everything is really connected, influences everything else, etc.)
