The thinking-meat area of the human body we call the brain simply thinks - there is no mind' that suspires from its serpentine loops  it like metaphysical methane gas from a fleshy swamp.

We are the unfortunate inheritors of a religiously inspired neural representation of the brain as forming a sarcoidal safe-house for a spirito-transcendentalist tenant which somehow exists (though it is never explained how) lodger-like within the meaty property our physical body.

 

For mind-brain dualists our fleshy bodies exist as bothersome bipedal cargo containers  to taxi around what the philo-religious tradition calls our "souls" or "spirits."  

Such "spirits" or "minds"  are referred to as: the immaterial part of a person and are housed in a head packed with meaty human pulp neatly coiled like a sentient sausage within the thin protective carapace of our skulls.

Such fantasies provide the opportunity for the dualists to make another  putative distinction between the neurological *us* and *the world outside* which they label with the reification  *reality*  as if we had just landed a space vehicle on a strange planet upon which we could not venture outside without osseo-dermatological space-suits.

Such is the extent in which this juvenilia has been internalised by modern man, it is as difficult to remove this primitive Platonic dualism from the meaty bits of one's indoctrinated and coerced encephalon as it is to scrape dog-dirt from a suede shoe.

It is time to reject the Platonic doctrine that reality exists (rather than what is actual or real) and that the reification consists of two basic opposing domains, often taken to be the mental and  the material.

Dualistic Fantasies

The list of dualistic phantoms in relation to the embrained body - embodied brain is endless and pitifully boring:

You may find unintentional mind-brain dualisms embedded in my own language too. Look hard at what I write below, for I am no exception. It is a linguistic leprosy which has infected the thinking, communicating human brain.

The meteaphysical malignancy of mind-brain dualism is a Platonist cancer or transcendentalist tumour that is malignant and metastasised and polluted the cultures of most human communities.

Our lexicon is contaminated - our semantics sullied. The persistent use of the reificative terms: mind, and consciousness, by the psychology-industry as a convenient fictive shortcut for their imagined spooky,  immaterial part of a person is an old fashioned acceptance of an irrational and unnecessary  doctrine that there exists something called "reality" which consists of two basic opposing elements - one corporeal and the other conceptual.

The passe hypostasisation of the process of thinking and language production as: the mind, (using a definite article followed by the reificative noun "mind" ) is meant to  suggest that the action of the gelatinous encephalitic meat is a thing - a disembodied mental object that exists. But actions don't exist, only acting entities exist. It is not the movement of the moving arm that exists - it is the moving arm.

The synaptic electro-chemical convergencies which characterise the networked interconnections of the corporeal brain are the way an embodied holistic brain exists.

The human brain is a powerful organ, yet it weighs only about three pounds. It has a sausagey texture similar to firm jelly. It not accommodate a phantom "mind,"  but a fatty network of connective tissue that registers that which effects the autogenous self-processing meaty material of the central nervous system, together with the electro-chemical sensorial "information" or "data"  flowing in from its outlying fleshy colonies of ubiquitous biological groupings of material sensors detecting the changing cells in the far reaches of its somatic empire.

The Platonic Rump

It is not the mind, for the mind (and the rest of the word's many nursery synonyms) is not a thing. Mind is what the surviving primitive Platonic rump and self-deluded collection of brain-washed and washing folk-psychologists refer to as a separate insubstantial compendium of memory. Memory does not exist either. What exists is the memorialising human entity and its constantly re-configuring neurological meaty-network continually updating the results of the workings of the coiled jelly into new, fleshy, textural cerebral patterns.

As I see it, that which we call mind, or consciousness, or memory, should really be referred to as the processing brain. The ever-modifying meaty results of so called "brain-activity" IS the brain.  The reconfigurating, brain is how the ever-changing brain EXISTS.

The material of the embodied brain-protein continually changes its nature - its physical schemata. The constantly re-modelling brain-meat adapts its existential modality to the impingements of its environment and its entiative actuality. The complex of chemical and electronic attributes that determine the characteristic autogenic actions and reactions of its fleshy self-transformational material exists differently and responds and changes seamlessly without any of the useful human fictions of "time" with its manufactured  transcendental temporal interstices of: seconds, minutes, hours, days and years.  As one of the uncountable objects of the continuum the meat of each brain  alters the way it exists as a physical object and then degenerates and dies and its decomposed material becomes a part of the universe-wide substances available for cosmic recycling.

Artificial Intelligence
Computers will never be able to develop the electronic equal of the human "mind" simply because the human "mind" does not exist to be emulated.

Because the human brain exists as an organic physical object theoretically  there is no physical reason why objects could not eventually be developed which could match or even surpass the computational power of human brain-meat.

An electronic  calculator calculates and we therefore refer to it as a calculator. We do not say:

Lend me your calculating please.  We say. Lend me your calculator please.

I refute the suggestion that the jelly-meat within the skull undergoes a process instituted, programmed or moderated by something called the mind, which produces something which is experienced on some secondary - higher - transcendental non-physical level, or spiritous recollected storage compendium of prior experiences and remembrances.

My claim is that the grey meat-matter 'self-processes itself by material metamorphosis,' and the stimulation for such intrinsic transformations comes from within itself and of itself  following exterior and interior stimuli.

Like the twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, the meat is itself momentarily electro-chemically transformed during intermittant bursts of networked connectivity. But the twinkling and thinking does not exist - only the electronic twinkling brain-meat and the meaty human thinker exists. There is no twinkling effect which can be separated from the wires and bulbs. The useful but ontologically fallacious term: "twinkling effect" is no more than a linguistic convenience created to avoid the true but tedious periphasis involved in providing a accurate physical description of the phenomenologically incorrect way that the garland of wired bulbs festooned around the tree. actually exists.

As each combination and multiconnection of coloured bulbs is energised the lights (the electron-energised filaments within the coloured bulb) exist in that way, when the next sequence replaces it - the lights exist in a new way.

The product - the twinkling effect  is only perceived phenomenolgically as a "thing"  by the human observer.

When he sees it he feels satisfied, for he has paid good bucks to buy a box of "twinkling" fairy lights which change the way that they exist in the way they do. For the wires and lamps there is no "twinkling"  produced - they just switch on and off quickly. For the human brain there is no thinking  produced - the thinking meaty organism simply changes the existential modality of its firm jelly-like flesh as its electro-chemical synapsal  switches bridge the network of reticulated connectors.

The embodied brain transforms itself ontogenetically - metamorphosing its substance organically. It is a purely biological unfolding of active and reactive organic events, gradually transubstantiating its meaty fabric chemically and electronically from a simple to a more complex existential state. The brain-meat reconstitutes itself and mediates with itself self-referentially. The neurological network adapts to its spatio-temporal environment and the entities and phenomena with which it shares the world.

It is with this description of this unique reflexive biologic transfiguring biochemical mechanism that I describe what I conceive of as THE PROCESS OF THINKING and its ancillary and complimentary electro-biochemical mechanism of language. But beware of our corrupted language, for my reference to the process of thinking should not be interpreted as suggesting that such a metaphysical phenomena exists in the world. It is only the processor that exists, whether the processor in question is the human brain your computer chip or the central heating thermostat.  No action at all exists in the cosmos.  What exists are active entities
There is no dichotomy between an acting actor and his or her action

Like every other entity in the cosmos brains do not "do" anything -  "doing" does not exist  - only "doers, agents, factors, actors, functionaries, causal objects" exist.

Take a simple calculator - the kind they give away in some banks. There lies the tiny calculator in your hand. 

You key in 2 x 2 and press total. In the window you see the number 4. The calculator hasn't produced anything at all - it still exists, but in a different mode from the way that it existed when it had the 0 in its window. There is perhaps a slight undetectable change in its temperature from the heat of your hand.

The factory has fitted a tiny circuit-board made of material arranged in such a manner that [metaphorically speaking] if electric current passes through it various electronic gates open and close. It is a purely material object. It has no tiny mind, or spirit.  Like the human brain its functions are purely due to the changeable  disposition of its network of contiguous components.

But what about the result, you interject, surely the number 4 is a product of the calculative process? No, it is a new existential modality of the processing calculator. The calculator hasn't 'produced' anything at all - it has just modified its existential modality - it exists in a different way to the way it existed before the keys were touched by your fingers.

And, as you observe its changed form - YOU change the manner in which you exist too.  The existential modality of your brain-meat changed the minute you looked at the number 4 and cognised its transformational  significance. You too now exist in a different manner as soon as you cognised the number 4 from the way you did when you cognised the numbers 2 x 2 before you punched the keys.

Now do the sum in your brain-jelly alone - this time you ARE the calculator AND the calculation.  You become conscious of the number 4 - keep repeating it - your brain is in the existential repeat mode, and your neurons are firing in a reprise networking sequence.  This sequencing is a process, an action performed by the neurons via the synapsal on/off switching of millions of networking connections.  Your brain-jelly is networking - but, like the fairy-lights, it is not a separate network that is flickering - it is the total fleshy mush of your brain-pan with its billions of specialised cells like the filaments of the bulbs and the wires of the Christmas lights. The lights don't have a network  - they are networked.  They don't' have a separate twinkling effect, [in spite of what the salesman says] because twinkling does not exist - only the twinkling lights exist when they are plugged in and the current switched on - they ARE the twinkling effect - the lights are existing in the same way that you are neuronally twinkling. That is why the print on the box proclaims: TWINKLING FAIRY LIGHTS.


When you think, you exist in the same way that you are thinking. When you are filling in a crossword puzzle, you exist in the same way that you are filling in a crossword puzzle. There is no: filling in a cross-word puzzle way of existing that  exists and can be separated or determined as being any different from you filling in a cross-word puzzle.



And so I hold that whilst we may be said to be conscious, we do not have a consciousness, - we may dance, but we do not have a dancing, the calculator may calculate but it doesn't have a calculating, the lights may twinkle but they do not have a twinkling, we may be said to think, but we do not have a thinking or a mind.

Due to our Platonic brainwashing there is a constant pressure upon us to separate out something spooky from our embodied brain and the modifications it undergoes. And so our meat thinks and changes its existential format at so many twinkles per second - and the outcome...?

The workings of the embodied brain can be seen with x-rays as the activity of the electrical and blood activity of the meat which confirms that the organ is activating or processing and that we are observing the physical brain and not a mental thing from the dark ages of medieval superstition, which can't be seen or detected.

No two brains have the same topographical physicality. I read somewhere that brains develop differently and respond physically in response to what they think - to the work that the embodied brain imposes upon itself and what the embodied brain thinks with and about itself. [no dualism intended here] and that overworked sections extend the networks to compensate for the added load.

Neurophysicians also tell us that damaged parts grow new cells to replace injured ones. In this way I would expect infant brains to be somewhat similar, and then grow more and more dissimilar as the person gets older. However there is probably a large genetical input which influences brain shape and layout too don't' you think?

I am not simply playing with words and pontificating about the significance of the meaning of the word mind.  Neither am I indulging in some sort of nit-picking nominalist or eliminativist quibbling - although plainly I am indeed an eliminativist. I am simply protesting at the crudity of the abstraction mind, being employed to describe what is plainly the gelatinous jellified brain.

In other words neither mind nor consciousness exist - they are both myths perpetuated by those that make money out of the idea. Only the conscious brain-meat exists minding its existential business of survival

My point is that mind, is not some 'thing' as the noun-word mind, suggests, the meat is a working-processor. The transformational self-processing brain operates or exists by dynamically adjusting and accommodating its original neuronal network and meaty templates from one moment to the next.

The dispiriting failure of folk-psychology is that it apprehends mind, as a thing rather than a processing brain.  The myth is embedded in the language we have inherited.

There are many telling give-aways, which show that inherent logic intrudes [perhaps unconsciously] into natural language and gives the existential game away - some examples:

I have a mind to tell him what I think. [Compare: She is always on my mind.

I'll bear that in mind.

She's got a brain in her head hasn't she?  [Not: She's got a mind in her head hasn't she?]

She's got a mind of her own.  [Not: She's got a brain of her own.]

She's out of her mind. Not: She's out of her brain.

He's got a lesion on the brain and his mind is affected.

As you know, etymologically  the word mind, means memory [O. E. 'gemynd.']

A dictionary definition of 'mind' - That part of man which thinks, feels and wills as contrasted with body. (Webster's Universal Dictionary pp 884. )

The myth of mind, as contained in Webster's Universal Dictionary's version of the duality, corresponds, reinforces and defines folk-psychology's Platonic-rump version of mind.  If I simply ignored the myth of mind  and accepted it as the natural language version then I would feel guilty of participating in the perpetuation of a neuro-physiological lie.

I believe the concept of some sort of higher domain of mind or memory being cognised as being in some way distinct from the actual brain material and separate from it as a product of its meaty machinations is wrongful.  Such an out-of-date concept is an obstacle in our understanding of the ball of thinking meat we carry around all day.