Most scientists believe that mind, or
consciousness, is an epiphenomenon of brain function, so they would state the
mind-body problem as, “How does the brain create the intensely personal
experience of consciousness?” David Chalmers calls this “the hard problem” of
consciousness; it has never been definitively answered.
Readers of this blog should know that this
question has no answer because the brain doesn’t create consciousness. Mind
creates itself as a logical entity
that is atemporal and aspatial, that is, it has no position in space or time.
It does have a logical structure in which all possible logical concepts imply
or are implied by each other, combining in all possible ways to form other
concepts. As I explained here, this logical structure
forms a layered hierarchy of logical concepts in which the layers can be seen
as occurring at different times. In this view, mind becomes a physical universe
in which there are brains that create temporal or physical pictures of mind
that are different in each brain. The reason that philosophers find the
mind-body problem so difficult is that they don’t know that there are two aspects
to mind and the universe: one atemporal, aspatial, and purely logical, and one
temporal, spatial, and physical. (Actually,
you can think of the logical universe as physical too, just in a different
sense, and I actually did that in an early post, but lately I’ve been using
“physical” to mean just the temporal universe.)
