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What the mind is for
4 comments
In responding to the question “What is a Mind?”, we’ve
examined defining properties of a mind in some detail from
different disciplinary perspectives.
I have argued that these defining properties are:
Subjectivity: You are the subjective aspect of your body,
what it is to be your body from the inside as opposed to
observing it from the outside. Only you can know what that
is like.
Consciousness: The capability of consciousness is added
to subjectivity; a conscious subject feels like something.
The function of consciousness is to determine how you are
doing in terms of your vital needs. These states register as
feelings of pleasure and unpleasure, of which there are a
great variety.
Intentionality: Feelings are about things. Our perceptions
and other representations concern objects in the outside
world, which is the only place where they can be resolved.
This ‘aboutness’ is called intentionality and links our
subjective feelings to the external environment.
Agency: This is the ability to own our actions and
responses. We use thinking as a tool for imagining
possible outcomes before deciding how to act, thereby
suppressing our instincts.
I’ve taken you on a journey of exploring what a mind is and tried
to address the question ‘what is a mind for?’. I’ve already said
that you are your mind and you are also your body. So, what is
the difference between you and your body? I argue that you are
the being of your body - you are the subjective aspect of your
body. The mind is not an object - it is a subject.
Through thinking, the mind turns yourself back into itself as an
object, so you can think about yourself in relation to other
things.
Introduction to What is a Mind?
60 comments
Mark Solms - Professor of Psychology, University of Cape
Town
When I was six years old, I was faced with questioning my
religious beliefs and I started wondering about life after death.
Thinking back this must have been the first time I had needed to
develop an understanding of the mind.
In my career as a neuropsychologist, I have researched the links
between the clinical findings of psychoanalysis and research
findings generated by the neurosciences.
I welcome you to this course that presents a current
understanding of the mind from multiple disciplinary
perspectives. You will have a chance to consider these
perspectives and discuss how they add to our understanding of
how the mind works.
What are you if not your mind? This raises questions of
fundamental importance. I hope this course will get you thinking
deeply on the question: What is a Mind?
I encourage you to follow the members of the course team by
clicking the links below:
Mark Solms (Lead Educator)
Aimee Dollman (Mentor & Host)
Angela Harwood (Mentor)
The course team may not be able to respond to all of the
questions you may have, and so we encourage you to use the
discussion forum at the bottom of each step to engage with and
respond to questions and comments posted by fellow learners
over the coming weeks.
Ques and Ans
The mind according to me is an air like structure-less formless but essential thing which
is full of energy and life. It is what we need to make sense of the world around, to
perceive, to feel , to decide what to do. I would depict it as a big box with lot of tiny
boxes of files which are of different matters. Each box is neatly labelled and connected
to few others, with blue and white ones making the decisions to do things work etc,
important to sustain life and interests, red boxes of thoughts which don't serve any
purpose but are filled with emotions and maybe dark matters. Green boxes of calm
perhaps added here and there.
What are you if not your mind?
31 comments
By asking the question, ‘What are you - if not your mind?’,
some fundamental questions are being raised. The mind is
studied implicitly and explicitly by a range of different
disciplines. The focus varies from the anatomical and
physiological scene of action in neurosciences to the
societal questions about being human in the Humanities.
Yet on their own, none of these single disciplinary
perspectives has a completely satisfactory response to the
question, ‘what is a mind?’.
In this course reading, What is a Mind? - Perspectives, I describe
how a range of disciplines approach the question: What is a
Mind? I will be making reference to these different disciplinary
approaches later in the course:
Humanities
Philosophy
Arts
Psychology
Psychoanalysis
Neuroscience
Computer Science
While perspectives from the Humanities and the Arts do not
expect to find an answer to the question of being human, other
disciplines such as Psychology seek to understand the mind
empirically and study it as rigorously as one would study any
other object.
The What is a Mind? - Perspectives reading argues for the need of
an interdisciplinary approach to studying the
mind. Neuropsychoanalysis tries to overcome the
weaknesses inherent in narrowly focused approaches by
combining disciplinary perspectives. For example, it embraces
all the complexities of subjectivity and the richness of lived
experience by correlating the Humanities-like knowledge
derived from the psychoanalytical methods with the objective
data derived from neuroscientific experiments. In this way, the
strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches act as
mutual correctives upon each other.
Which and how have disciplinary perspectives shaped your own
understanding of what is a mind?
A glossary of terms, as used in this course, is provided as a
reference since other disciplines you may be more familiar with
have sometimes used these terms differently. You may find
revisiting this glossary useful as you continue through the
course. We have also compiled a reading list that include books
that delve more deeply into ideas introduced in this course.
© University of Cape Town CC-BY-NC
Four defining properties of the mind
27 comments
In the following six weeks we use the evidence and
insights from diverse disciplines to address the question:
What is a mind? This will lead to further questions such as
what a mind is for and what it does.
For me it is a disturbing exercise to ask my own Psychology
students what a ‘mind’ is. Psychology is of course the science
of the mind, and yet they have great difficulty answering the
question. I sometimes gain the impression from their answers
that the more you study Psychology, the less you know about
the mind. They seem to end up believing that it is just a very
complicated information-processing device. They forget what it
means to be a mind.
This course focuses on four defining features of the mind:
Subjectivity (Week 2)
Consciousness (Week 3)
Intentionality (Week 4)
Agency (Week 5)
In the following weeks, we will unpack each of these defining
characteristics of the mind and explore how and why they relate
to the body and brain.
© University of Cape Town CC-BY-NC
Downloads
Robot operating computer
© Steve Jurvetson CC-BY
What or who else has a mind?
56 comments
I have noted that we would not ascribe a mind to a carpet,
but what about your increasingly intelligent mobile phone
and other forms of artificial intelligence?
We sometimes refer in jest to inanimate objects as having
minds of their own. While we don’t usually mean this in a literal
sense, we are increasingly confronted with technology that
seems to display some of the qualities we might ascribe to
possessing a mind. These artificial beings can compete in quiz
game shows and chess games against very skilled people.
Does this mean that computers or similar technologies have or
at some point in the future could possess minds? If you don’t
think this is possible, what is it about the mind that makes us
unable to construct one?
Share your thoughts in the discussion area, read and respond
to comments made by other learners and ‘like’ those that you
find interesting.
© University
Thinking and Feeling
37 comments
The distinction between thinking and feeling is absolutely
fundamental to understanding the mind. In this course, I
argue that feelings represent problems, needs or demands
upon the mind to perform work. Feelings make us aware
that something unexpected, unpredictable or unsolved is
occurring.
When I say that feelings represent demands upon the mind to
perform work, what I really mean is that they represent
demands on thinking. The mind in this colloquial sense that I’m
using, should be referred to as thinking. Feelings come first and
thoughts are ways of dealing with the feelings - ways of as it
were - thinking our way out of the feelings, finding a solution
that meets the need that lies behind the feeling. I say they come
first in the hierarchical or developmental sense, in that first we
have feelings.
Feeling first in the evolutionary, developmental and funtional design sense .. qualified by
the mature adult being able to loop back from the thinking that goes with feelings to
manage / suppress / control / move on from the base line
I totally agree, feelings come first. They provide us of information about the world,
ourselves and the others.
Representations of the mind
26 comments
We cannot see a mind, although we might imagine what a
mind might look like. How have depictions of the mind
resonated with your understanding of what a mind is?
Images used in this course - which include the above image,
the course trailer, logo and activity icons - are photographs of
an artwork installation by Professor Pippa Skotnes. This
installation, completed in 2013, is housed in the entrance hall to
the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town
and was inspired by psychologists’ interest in understanding the
mind. It comprises the following sections:
a wall mural entitled ‘Breath’ that takes as its starting point
the conception of the mind as expressed by |Una Rooi,
one of the last speakers of N|uu, who died in 2012;
a set of turning boxes visualising aspects of the history and
practice of the discipline of psychology;
three clock-like disks dedicated to Sigmund Freud, Charles
Darwin and Frantz Fanon;
and several smaller displays depicting the history of
psychology.
It is not obvious how to depict the mind in art or even describe it
in words. Although representation of the mind has been done in
many different forms - sometimes in amusing ways - we do not
have a way to do this well.
Can you describe any depictions of the mind you have seen
which resonate with your understanding of what the mind is?
Add your comments below. If you find or have created an
image, you may also wish to share it on our Padlet Wall.
© University of Cape Town CC-BY-NC
I totally agree, feelings come first. They provide us of information about the world,
ourselves and the others.
I'm trying to make some sense of this. I can see that for a young baby he / she is a
bundle of feelings without having developed the power of thought to solve the problems
set by these feelings. So the reaction to the feeling of hunger is to cry loudly until
someone provides the required food. However, later in life it appears to me, that there
are thoughts or memories raised in the mind that can evoke feelings of pleasure or
sorrow or anger or desire.
I am also puzzled by the concept of mindfulness mentioned in several comments. I
belong to a meditation group that uses mindfulness techniques and have learnt that the
mind is forever active, jumping from one thought to another and that this is what minds
do. One sure way to quieten such an active mind is to concentrate on our breathing.
There has not been much discussion as to whether or not feelings precede these
thoughts but in my experience many of my thoughts are quite mundane and don't
appear to be preceded by feeling.
Studying the mind
20 comments
The mind is first and foremost something subjective. You
can’t see a mind, you can only ever be one.
Assuming there is a subjective aspect to everything, does that
then mean that all objects have a mind? Panpsychism is a
concept in philosophy which says that this is indeed the case -
that there’s a subjective aspect to everything - a carpet, a
monkey, a bacterium - which must mean that everything has a
mind.
The problem of other minds is a key question in philosophy
which sits at the other extreme. It says that because the mind is
something subjective, you can’t observe it, you can only ever be
one. So how do we study the mind if we can’t observe it? How
do you perform scientific experiments, which demand
objectivity, on something that is fundamentally subjective?
These questions lie at the heart of psychology, which is the
science of the mind. After centuries of grappling with these
problems, psychologists concluded that because we cannot
directly observe the mind, we should rather study behaviours
which are objective manifestations of the mind. In fact
behaviourism went further to say that the mind itself does not
exist, we can only rely on and study behaviours. In this way, the
psyche came to be excluded from the science of the mind.
