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

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

Psychologists also commit the error of reification when they equate the mind with the brain. They give the mind a substantive material existence. They describe it as "a hunk of meat that ... contains about 30 billion cells, called neurons." But of course that is not at all what the mind is.

Sometimes psychologists use the words "mind" and "consciousness" synonymously. This is actually closer to the truth. However, they do so without understanding what sort of thing consciousness is. They still believe that consciousness, like the mind, is a physical object. They believe that it can be studied with the empirical tools of neuroscience, observed empirically and measured quantitatively.

This, too, is a misunderstanding of the true nature of consciousness: consciousness is not an object, but it is a state of being, a quality, a condition. It belongs in the same category as other conditions which human beings experience--hunger, anger, fear, thirst, fatigue, pain, and pleasure.

To be sure, all these conditions have physiological correlates, and these can be studied in the laboratory: fatigue is accompanied or caused by muscular decay, glucose depletion, etc. Fear and anger are accompanied by increased adrenalin flow, accelerated heart beat, etc. Pain can be the result of tissue damage, etc. But these physical correlates are not the thing itself.

Take hunger: Where is hunger located? The cause of hunger--insufficient food intake--takes place in the stomach. But hunger itself, the sensation and awareness of hunger, does not. If we were to locate this awareness anywhere in our body, we would probably say that it emanates from our brain, since that is where we claim to do our thinking. But wherever we decide to locate our awareness of being hungry, the very fact that it is not in our stomach--after all, we don't do our thinking in our stomach--proves that (1) the physiological fact of insufficient food intake and (2) the result--ing sensation of hunger are not the same thing.

And so it is with all our experiences: Pain is the sensation, the experience which results from tissue damage. It is not the tissue damage itself.

Consciousness, too, is an experience. It may be the result of chemical processes in our nervous system, just like pain is the result of tissue damage, but it does not consist of chemical processes.

To ask where consciousness (i.e. the mind) is located--in which part of our brain, for example--is similar to asking in which part of our body "life" is located. Life is a process, an action, a verb, not a thing, not an entity, not a noun. It is the same with mind and consciousness. These are actions. Mind and consciousness are not located in "Brodmann area 46" or in the "anterior cingulate sulcus" or in any other region of the brain--any more than "life" is located in your knee or in your toe.

True, different functions are performed by different organs. Your eyes enable you to see, your stomach enables you to digest, your sex organs enable you to experience orgasm.