You haven't read him. You are a b/s artist with nothing to say.

You haven't read him. You are a b/s artist with nothing to say. — Bartricks

Bless your little heart, friend. Go in peace.

You haven't read him.

Do you know how I know that?

I'm curious what you'll say, knowing how wrong you are.

You haven't read him, pie.

You have nothing to say. You are a wikipedia paraphrasing bot.

Our brains can be divided. Our minds cannot be. Thus, our minds are not our brains. — Bartricks

Here you make a case that 'mind' and 'brain' are used differently. The thesis is true. But you forget that we can give one another a piece of our mind. Or https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of%20two%20minds So the argument is flawed.

But who here is claiming that minds are brains? Not Ryle. One of us would know that.

You ain't read him. Funny.

An indivisible thing has no parts (for if it had parts it could be divided into them). And as such the indivisibility of the mind also implies its eternal existence.

it should also be noted that the existence of simple, indivisible things can be independently established. For it is manifest to reason that not everything can be made of other things, for then one has to posit an actual infinity of parts, which is incoherent.

Thus, there are simple things in existence.

And if we listen to our reason rather than convention, we will find that we are among those simple things. — Bartricks

Why is an actual infinity of parts incoherent? We are comfortable with the infinity of the primes. If we listen to careful proofs rather than internet cranks. I agree that it's more intuitive for us humans to think in terms of genuine atoms, but I'm not sure reality plays by our rules. Maybe our physicists keep finding parts made of parts made of parts....

Why does indivisibility imply eternal existence? That seems like an unwarranted leap. This whole foray into sincere pre-Kantian metaphysics is quaint even. Quasi-theological. Remains of the day, last scraps of a vanishing religion.

Half a mind makes no sense. Half a banana, yes. Half a sandwich, yes. Half a mind, no - incoherent — Bartricks

Not so fast. I'm of half a mind to correct you and half a mind to leave you to your sandbox and its kitty droppings.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/half+a+mind

Or, for your perusal, the etymology of dubious...being of two minds. I'll let you look it up if you care.

Also, some Ryle, to rile you up perhaps.

One of the central negative motives of this book is to show that ‘mental’ does not denote a status, such that one can sensibly ask of a given thing or event whether it is mental or physical, ‘in the mind’ or ‘in the outside world’. To talk of a person’s mind is not to talk of a repository which is permitted to house objects that something called ‘the physical world’ is forbidden to house; it is to talk of the person’s abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world. Indeed, it makes no sense to speak as if there could be two or eleven worlds. Nothing but confusion is achieved by labelling worlds after particular avocations. Even the solemn phrase ‘the physical world’ is as philosophically pointless as would be the phrase ‘the numismatic world’, ‘the haberdashery world’, or ‘the botanical world.’

But it will be urged in defence of the doctrine that ‘mental’ does denote a status that a special footing must be provided for sensations, feelings and images. The laboratory sciences provide descriptions and correlations of various kinds of things and processes, but our impressions and ideas are unmentioned in these descriptions. They must therefore belong somewhere else. And as it is patent that the occurrence of a sensation, for instance, is a fact about the person who feels the pain or suffers the dazzle, the sensation must be in that person. But this is a special sense of ‘in’, since the surgeon will not find it under the person’s epidermis. So the sensation must be in the person’s mind.

Moreover sensations, feelings and images are things the owner of which must be conscious of them. Whatever else may be contained in his stream of consciousness, at least his sensations, feelings and images are parts of that stream. They help to constitute, if they do not completely constitute, the stuff of which minds are composed. Champions of this argument tend to espouse it with special confidence on behalf of images, such as what ‘I see in my mind’s eye’ and what I have ‘running in my head’. They feel certain qualms in suggesting too radical a divorce between sensations and conditions of the body. Stomach-aches, tickles and singings in the ears have physiological attachments which threaten to sully the purity of the brook of mental experiences. But the views which I see, even when my eyes are shut, and the music and the voices that I can hear, even when all is quiet, qualify admirably for membership of the kingdom of the mind. I can, within limits, summon, dismiss and modify them at will and the location, position and condition of my body do not appear to be in any correlation with their occurrences or properties.

This belief in the mental status of images carries with it a palatable corollary. When a person has been thinking to himself, retrospection commonly shows him that at least a part of what has been going on has been a sequence of words heard in his head, as if spoken by himself. So the venerable doctrine that discoursing to one self under one’s breath is the proprietary business of minds reinforces, and is reinforced by, the doctrine that the apparatus of pure thinking does not belong to the gross world of physical noises, but consists instead of the more ethereal stuff of which dreams are made.

like I say, you are a wikipedia paraphrasing bot.

I bet you say that to all the girls, you old rake.

Yes, I like to Ryle them up.

Do you have any kind of point to make? Or did you just want to pretend to have read things you haven't read?

I've made quite a few. Be wary of taking grammar (by which I mean, in this context, proprieties of usage) for theology-strength cosmic insight. Maybe don't think about the mind as some kind of weird plate made of dream stuff. Maybe the mind is better thought of in terms of understanding and unifying a person's doings in this world. The mind can be thought of as the ways their body do. If we are tempted to call it 'single,' that's probably because a person is a unity, a focus of praise and blame. We explain what a person does by reference to a single system of beliefs, unified by the norm that such beliefs don't contradict one another.

An argument matey. Make an argument.

An argument matey. Make an argument. — Bartricks

Sorry, matey. You are reminding me of my cat when she no longer chases the red dot but only stares at it. I feel as old as yonder elm.

Hot air. Come on, argue something.

Is the mind a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to parts of the brain? — TiredThinker

I read the question and started thinking about 'the mind'.

But perhaps I need also to think about 'thing', 'single thing', 'or' and 'have parts'. A sphere is (plausibly) a single thing. And it has whatever parts I decide to split it into, e.g. two hemispheres. Does the sphere 'have' those parts or did I just impose parts on the sphere which had no parts at all until I intervened? So, the word 'or' in the question may be misleading - being a single thing and having parts may not be exclusive categories.

I congratulated my friend on getting a new job. Was that congratulation a thing? Is it still a thing? The congratulation was not a nothing. If it is a thing, I wonder whether it makes sense to wonder whether it has parts. If it is not a thing, then I wonder what criteria to apply to - lets say, things - to decide whether or not they are things. Are numbers things? Rankings in sport? Political offices?

"Is the office of President of the USA a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to the person of the President?" It may be that the OP questions make as much or as little sense as that.

We might find out that the mind is not a thing at all and not a nothing either.

I'm in two minds about this question.

On the one hand, when one does separate the halves of the brain, one can see evidence of a division of mind.

Sperry moved on to human volunteers who had a severed corpus callosum. He showed a word to one of the eyes and found that split-brain people could only remember the word they saw with their right eye. Next, Sperry showed the participants two different objects, one to their left eye only and one to their right eye only and then asked them to draw what they saw. All participants drew what they saw with their left eye and described what they saw with their right eye. Sperry concluded that the left hemisphere of the brain could recognize and analyze speech, while the right hemisphere could not.

https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roger-sperrys-split-brain-experiments-1959-1968

But on the other, since it seems to be merely a matter of connection and communication, the separation of my mind from your mind is a trivial matter, and mind is more like water than like anything discrete and separate, and if only we could communicate better we would all be of one mind.

an actual argument that the mind is not an immaterial soul — Bartricks

Isn't there an existential claim hiding there that needs justification in its own right...? "immaterial soul"?

Probably read this or something similar here on the forum... Mind is to body much like what digestion is to stomach.

Digestion is an activity. Something does it.
Thinking is an activity. Something does it. And the thing that does thinking is called 'a mind'.
You keep making category errors. A mind is a thing. An object. It is that which has mental states. That is why they are called mental states. States. Of. Mind.

There is a question over what kind of thing it is.

Our reason is our only source of insight into reality.

Our reason tells us that our minds are immaterial things (that's what a 'soul' is - an immaterial mind).

One of the ways in which it does this is to tell us that minds are indivisible. Half a mind makes no sense.

If something is indivisible then it is immaterial.

Why?

Because if something is extended in space, then it can be divided, for any region of space is infinitely divisible (which is a huge problem for the coherence of materialism about anything).

Thus, our minds appear to be immaterial things, for that is what our reason says about them.

That's positive evidence. There is a lot of it.

There's none that our minds are material. None. Prove me wrong.

"Is the office of President of the USA a single thing, or does it have parts? If it has parts, what are they? Are its parts tied to the person of the President?" It may be that the OP questions make as much or as little sense as that. — Cuthbert

:up:

Mind is to body much like what digestion is to stomach. — jorndoe

:up:

It's not a bunch of faculties. Faculties are had by a thing. Things are not made of faculties.

Same mistake, Hugh.

It can't be divided into faculties. It 'has' faculties. See?

Faculties are always the faculties 'of' something. Faculties of perception, reason and so on, are faculties 'of' a mind. — Bartricks

All things are not subject to the same the same ways of conception, of thinking about them. If the mind is understood to be a function of the brain (and a function is a thing, although not a physical thing in the sense of being a physical object directly discernible by the senses) or better, a set of functions, then to divide the general faculty of mind into specific faculties is perfectly in order.

The body, considered as a set of functions rather than as a mere thing (in the sense of being an object of the senses) can also be divided into functions: walking, running, digestion, respiration, excretion and so on.

So if the mind is the set of what we think of as mental faculties of the body, as opposed to the obviously physical faculties outlined above, then "faculties of perception, reason and so on" can reasonably be understood to be faculties or functions of the body, which all together make up the overall faculty or function of the body we call "mind".

"faculties of perception, reason and so on" can reasonably be understood to be faculties or functions of the body, which all together make up the overall faculty or function of the body we call "mind". — Janus

:up:

Allow me to recommend The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle. I only recently got around to this book, and it's just flamethrower for so many entrenched confusions concerning the mind. — Pie

Yes, it's a great book; I don't know how many years ago I read it, twenty maybe, and I don't remember too much of it specifically now, but it made a powerful impression on me. Around the same time I read a work by Arthur Koestler titled The Ghost in the Machine (a term coined by Ryle) which was also a pretty good read, if my dim impressions of it now are anything to go by. Maybe I'll revisit those two books, so thanks for the reminder: I'm pretty sure I still have them somewhere.

The term 'ghost in the machine' reminds us that it was Descartes who first thought of the body as a machine animated by a ghostly, incorporeal substance; the mind. Descartes has much to answer for in the tradition of thought that understands animals to be unfeeling machines, on account of the idea that they do not possess the faculty of rationality, which distinguishes the crown of creation, man, from them and justifies using them in whatever ways satisfy our need or desire.

Descartes who first thought of the body as a machine animated by a ghostly, incorporeal substance; the mind. — Janus

Actually just really read Descartes lately. Of course I was aware of his ideas, but it was useful to see them in context. As you may remember, he also wanted us to be 'lords and masters and nature' and fantasized about great advances in medicine, very Baconian. His analysis of light and its effect on the eye and the mind was brilliant.

Descartes has much to answer for in the tradition of thought that understands animals to be unfeeling machines, on account of the idea that they do not possess the faculty of rationality, which distinguishes the crown of creation, man, from them and justifies using them in whatever ways satisfy our need or desire. — Janus

Indeed. This is maybe the worst part of his thinking, perhaps a byproduct of what I think was a typical evasion of the time...namely rescuing the soul from a Newtonian determinism. I respect Spinoza and Hobbes for just accepting the deterministic implications and, in their own ways, avoiding the gulf between body and mind.

All I can do is repeat the point: faculties, 'functions' and so forth are always of a thing or involve things. You can't just have 'functions' floating about by themselves.

So, the mind 'has' faculties. It is not a set of faculties. That's a category error.

Minds 'have' states - they're called mental states for that very reason. A mental state is a 'state of mind'. That is, a state a mind can be in.

Minds do not, in my view, have 'funtions' as that supposes that they were made for some purpose, whereas they are not 'made' at all.

But nevertheless, it is always something that has a function, be it a person or a process or whatever. And it is a category error to confuse the function with the person whose function it is.

It is ironic that someone here has mentioned Ryle - someone who clearly hasn't read him or read him and understood him - for this was a point he made over and over.

Minds are things. There are things. And minds are among them. What kind of a thing is what philosophers debate. Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things. That's what the debate is over.

Even a functionalist about the mind is not someone who identifies the mind with a set of functions. Rather they are someone who thinks that two functionally isomorphic systems will both have mental states if one them does. The mind remains a thing, the functionalism is simply a claim about what governs whether a thing has mental states (and thus whether a thing is a mind or not).

As you may remember, he also wanted us to be 'lords and masters and nature' — Pie

Yes, and this kind of delusional thinking is what has led us to the situation we find ourselves in today.

Indeed. This is maybe the worst part of his thinking, perhaps a byproduct of what I think was a typical evasion of the time...namely rescuing the soul from a Newtonian determinism. I respect Spinoza and Hobbes for just accepting the deterministic implications and, in their own ways, avoiding the gulf between body and mind. — Pie

I agree that would be a motivation for this kind of thinking; the desire to separate us from nature in order to justify the rectitude of the idea of free will and accountability, as I recall Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols.

Materialists think minds are material things and immaterialists and dualists think they are immaterial things. — Bartricks

This is too simplistic, since it is obvious that mind is not a material things in the sense of being an object of the senses, which is the common definition of a material thing. It is too simplistic to think that if the mind is not a material thing in this sense that it must be an immaterial thing; where immaterial thing (substance) is thought as somehow analogous to material thing (substance). This reification gives rise to the idea of immaterial substance, and if I recall correctly (it's a long time since I read the book) this is something Ryle explicitly points out in Concept of Mind.

Needless to say, the mere fact I have said these things will be, for you, sufficient grounds to reject them, is that not true? — Bartricks

Not at all. You seem to be projecting your own propensities onto me. I don't have time to address anything else you said right now; I have to work. Perhaps I'll come back to it later.

Yes, and this kind of delusional thinking is what has led us to the situation we find ourselves in today. — Janus

I'm ambivalent about the 'lords and masters' idea. I think we want access to nutritious food, effective medicine, protection from storms, etc., but we end up with side-effects like polution, global warming, the possibility of a panopticonic dystopia, etc.

agree that would be a motivation for this kind of thinking; the desire to separate us from nature in order to justify the rectitude of the idea of free will and accountability, as I recall Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols. — Janus

Indeed. And that reminds me that Fichte and Kant were quite concerned with this. I suspect it was one of 'the' problems of the day, somehow embracing Newton and Christianity at the same time.