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These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Mind or Matter It used to be a simple
question: what is the soul? "Mind" complicated the question because
it related the soul to a specific place, the brain, without being as specific.
Is mind the soul? Is mind more than the soul? Is mind less than the soul? The author of this book
thinks that the problem is simply formulated in a nonscientific way. “Mind” is
a generic term that refers to the set of cognitive faculties we humans have and
sometimes (depending on the speaker) it also encompasses consciousness. It would be more appropriate
to focus on cognition itself. While some may be reluctant to credit animals
with a mind, most will have no problem crediting them with some degree of
cognitive faculties, such as memory, learning and even reasoning. Cognition can
safely be assumed as a property of at least all living organisms, but a
property that comes in (continuous) degrees: humans have “more” of it than,
say, snails. Furthermore, there are
striking similarities between the behavior of cognitive (living) matter and the
behavior of non-cognitive (inanimate) matter. Even a piece of paper exhibits a
form of memory that resembles the way our memory works: if you bend it many
times in the same direction, it will progressively “learn” to bend in that
direction; if you stop bending it, it will slowly resume its flat position. Any
piece of matter “remembers” what has happened to it in its shape, and sometimes
in its chemical composition (that laboratory scientists can sometimes trace
back in time). Far from being unique to the mind, cognitive faculties appear to
be ubiquitous in nature. Memory and learning can
therefore be said to be ubiquitous in nature, as long as we assume that they
come in degrees. Cognition may not necessarily be an exclusive property of
living matter. Cognition may be a general property of matter, that the human
brain simply amplifies to perform very interesting actions. At least that part
of the mind, the one that has to do with cognitive faculties, may be “reduced”
to material processes after all. The other part, consciousness, is a vastly
more difficult topic. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Mind and Matter" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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