What is the mind? Don't study brain cells to understand it

International Journal on World Peace, June, 2008 by Tom Kando

This paper looks at the modern belief that the mind is the same thing as the brain, and therefore consists of genetic and chemical processes.

Contrary to this notion is the more common sense view that our minds are made up of experiences in the world and with others, and while the brain may be the material home of the mind, it is not the mind itself.

Professor Kando begins with a refutation of materialistic reductionism and positivism, and then builds on the work of William James, George Herbert Mead, and Joel Charon to make the case that the mind is a product of learning and not the same thing as the brain.

On November 4, 2007, the Sacramento Bee's Forum section reproduced a Washington Post article by Joel Achen-bach titled, "What Makes up our Mind and Gives us Consciousness?" Every time I come across an article about this topic--and it happens about once a year in sophisticated places like the New York Review of Books and in less sophisticated venues like Time Magazine--it brings my blood to a boil!

The modern world has come to a near-unanimous conception of the human mind as basically the same thing as the brain. This is a monumental and stupid mistake.

The guilt for this error belongs largely to the so-called social sciences, especially to Psychology. These folks have managed to convince the modern world of their stupid belief. As a result, by now, the popular culture, themedia and the public all subscribe to this modern-day mythology. Another example of this is a December 3, 2007 Time Magazine cover story titled "What Makes Us Moral?" Here, like practically everywhere else, mental phenomena such as "morality, empathy" arc said to be "deep in our genes," reducible to chemical processes.

In this article, I do two things: (1) I refute this pandemic twentieth-century myth and (2) I offer an alternative answer to the question: What is the Mind?

PSYCHOLOGISTS AND MOST OTHER PEOPLE CONFUSE THE BRAIN AND THE MIND

Why can psychologists (and consequently the public) not understand that the mind and the brain are not the same thing? Take for example the November 2007 Achenbach article in the Sacramento Bee:

* The author describes research done at George Mason University's Krasnow Institute "devoted to the study of the mind ..." and then he adds that "the human brain is a hunk of meat that ... contains about 30 billion cells, called neurons."

* The quote that "human brains can do things that no computer can match. ..." is followed by a quote from Steven Tinker's book How the Mind Works.

* Elsewhere in the article the author writes that, "the human brain has a premium feature: consciousness ... or self-awareness ..."

* ... and that, "there is an 'I' somewhere inside our skull."

* He also quotes the famous UC Berkeley philosopher Colin McGinn, who said that, "the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness."

* Next, we are told that psychologist Jim Olds proposes that the Federal Government invest $4 billion in a decade-long scientific project to study the mind, following the "1990s decade of the brain" which brought attention to neuroscience. Olds is quoted saying that, "brain science is an exhaustive collection of facts without a theory."

* We also learn that a group of scientists published a letter in the journal Science, in which they advocate a breakthrough in mind research, saying, "look at the progress already made through brain scans such as MRSs ..."

* The article's author also tells us that, " ... the mind isn't something that pops up on a computer screen. People have been poking around the brain in search of the mind for many centuries, and no one is even sure what neurological structures are the most critical in generating consciousness." He lists various brain structures that are allegedly important for this, e.g. "Brodmann area 46," the "anterior cingulate sulcus," the "thalamus," and of course "the .. .dipsy-doodle structure called the cerebral cortex."

All these quotations document the psychologist's confusion between the mind and the brain. Achenbach and the other psychologists whom he quotes use "brain" and "mind" interchangeably. Back and forth they go, from brain to mind and from mind to brain, as if the two were the same thing.

The error made by most psychologists is called reification (from the Latin word res, "thing"): This is when you make a thing out of a concept. In other words, when someone makes something real and tangible out of something which is not so. For example, take the idea of "evil." When we personify this idea into, say, the "devil," we reify it. Or take the concept of "society." When we say that "society is racist," we reify it, because in reality only people can be racist. There is no such thing as "society," over and beyond a large collection of individuals.

To what extent sociologists reify "society" is a long-standing controversy. The accusation comes largely from micro-sociologists such as myself. We feel that the idea that "society" is an independent agent, over and beyond its individual members, which is associated with Durkheim, reifies society. But we do not need to debate the pros and cons of Durkheimian Sociology here. I merely use this as an example of reification. The reader may prefer another example.