Friday, November 2, 2018

On the Mind/Body Problem


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.)

So here we are in the physical universe, and we’re looking at our minds to see if they have two aspects. Well, yes, they do. On one hand, we are exactly the same unchanging person from birth to death. On the other hand, we change all the time. These are two ways to see the logical concept we call, “I”. The unchanging aspect of our mind has no connection with the changing aspect. It doesn’t “do” anything. It simply exists. It is an aspect of everybody’s mind, yet it is unconnected with anybody’s personality. It is identically the same concept in all of us, and it exists always and everywhere. There is only one such atemporal mind, only one logical universe.
The changing aspect of our mind is generated by our individual brain. It lives in the physical universe and perceives everything about us that is physical, including our individual personality. There is a temporal mind for each of us.
The temporal mind exists within us and dies when we do. The atemporal mind exists always and everywhere. Nothing creates it; it exists necessarily. Mind is thought, and thought exists because a mind thinks it, so atemporal mind must think itself. This is the essence of consciousness: a thought thinking itself. As René Descartes realized, consciousness implies existence: “I think, therefore I am.”  In fact, atemporal consciousness is precisely identical with existence. This isn’t true for temporal consciousness and temporal existence. Philosophers have argued for years whether consciousness is prior to existence or vice versa. Well, atemporally there’s no question; they’re identical.
So now we have the answer to “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Existence/consciousness exists necessarily. The next question is, “How does the physical, temporal, universe come to be?” This is what I’ve been explaining for years on this blog. The short introduction might go as follows. Take the logical structure of mind with its many layers of concepts or ideas, each successive layer containing more concepts than the previous ones, and look at the successive layers as occurring sequentially in time. Call the concepts “points of spacetime.” Now you have a big bang, with space expanding in time, and you can apply the mathematics of physics and quantum mechanics to discover the details of the universe and make predictions that turn out to br correct. Since I’ve already explained this on this blog, I won’t do it again here. If you want to slog through it, follow the link above and read the posts in chronological order. You can skip the ones that deal with side issues. Happy reading!