With great difficulty.

0 isn't divisble. $\frac{0}{x} = 0$ where x is real.

What follows? Any ideas?

Maybe with the help of a taxidermist.

0 = the mind; or the mind and 0 belong to the same category of things?

0 = the mind; or the mind and 0 belong to the same category of things? — Daniel

That feels right!

With great difficulty. — Bartricks

I imagine that a hemispherectomy ain’t no walk in the park either.

I imagine that a hemispherectomy ain’t no walk in the park either. — praxis

One side-effect of split-brain surgery is two distinct minds (i.e. phenomenal self models) with personalities which can diverge over time. Also, split personality disorder demonstrates the "divisibility" of human mind.

I struggle to see what can be meant by the suggestion that mind is indivisible. Clearly @Bartricks' mind is completely separate from everyone else's and of a much finer construction; and each of our minds are divided from the others. The nearest I can get would be to say that mind is like water; each of us has their separate cup of water, some muddy and some salty and so on, but the separation is temporary, and somewhere is the Great Sea of Mind whence we all came and to which we all return.

Those that recall MarsMan, will be familiar with the idea of mind as a 'noncount noun', and in this way it makes sense to me that the mind of a mouse is complete as the mind of any human; big or small the cup is always filled with water and water is everywhere the same and in that sense indivisible.

Interesting. What's the cup, in this analogy?

A life, a brain, I suppose. and the mud is personality and identity.

A life, a brain, I suppose. — unenlightened

Mmm. I asked because I happened to be reading this thread in the middle of a conversation I was having with @Janus about mental events. It struck me that it's odd to assume mental events are different to brain activity in one sense (in the sense that phenomenology can give us true statements about mental events without being constrained by neuroscience), but then have one's concept of the mental constrained again by science in it's 'en-cuppedness' (to use your analogy).

Why the cup? Why not just the great sea of minds? As I said on the other thread, it sometimes seems to me that my wife knows what I'm thinking. It's only science that tells me she can't. So if science doesn't restrict what mind is (only brain), then why not ditch the idea that minds are private at all, or singular, or anything.

Maybe it's a colander?

Why the cup? Why not just the great sea of minds? — Isaac

I cannot say why. But I observe, as a matter of fact, everywhere but the internet and the phone, that minds are always embodied. Without embodiment there would indeed be nothing but a sea of mind, - at least that is the suggestion (sea of mind, not sea of minds), but the separation of physical senses into these eyes and those eyes produces the appearance of separation as the virtual 'point of view' that is each of our separate identities, together with the illusion of its indivisibility.

0 isn't divisble. 0x=0 where x is real.

What follows? Any ideas? — Agent Smith

Say what ?

You must mean $0 ^ {-1}$ isn't defined, (roughly) because of the last part of your statement. In other words, $f(x) = 0x = 0$ is not one-to-one and hence not invertible.

Maybe it's a colander? — Isaac

Well yes, I suppose it is; my mind pours out here and drips onto your screen, to be absorbed by your mind, and vice versa. They call it 'social being'.

why not ditch the idea that minds are private at all, or singular, or anything. — Isaac

I suggest that we understand the self primarily in normative terms, as a locus of responsibility. I ought to keep my story straight (maintain a coherent set of beliefs), report simple facts reliably, keep my promises...

Say what ?

You must mean isn't defined, (roughly) because of the last part of your statement. In other words, is not one-to-one and hence not invertible. — Pie

:chin:

I observe, as a matter of fact, everywhere but the internet and the phone, that minds are always embodied. — unenlightened

You observe minds? This is the empiricism creeping in. Once you let it in, any talk of 'mind seas' has to go.

You can observe brains are embodied. But then there's no brain sea.

my mind pours out here and drips onto your screen, to be absorbed by your mind, and vice versa. They call it 'social being'. — unenlightened

That's more like it. Out go private minds!

I suggest that we understand the self primarily in normative terms, as a locus of responsibility. I ought to keep my story straight (maintain a coherent set of beliefs), report simple facts reliably, keep my promises... — Pie

Interesting. My personal view is that the self is a modeling assumption used to delineate non-entropic forces from entropic ones. It locates the boundary between the system which is to be retained and the forces which would reduce its improbable structure to a nice even Gaussian distribution of variables.

But... Each to their own...

Interesting. My personal view is that the self is a modeling assumption used to delineate non-entropic forces from entropic ones. It locates the boundary between the system which is to be retained and the forces which would reduce its improbable structure to a nice even Gaussian distribution of variables. — Isaac

Different uses for different contexts ! I like your version...reminds me of @apokrisis's. But consider how selves function here on the forum. We track claims, hold one another to coherence norms, and just generally keep score.

Division by zero isn't allowed because zero has too many divisors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_divisor

Yeah, I think your version works socially. It also explains ideas like belonging (I have responsibility for this item), offenses against the person (it's not your responsibility to put my body in some location), etc...

There's a lot going for it.

I like yours too.

FWIW, I'm largely paraphrasing Robert Brandom who finds his own sources in Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Hegel. According to Brandom, Hegel's accomplishment was describing how groups could be bound by the norms that they were ( eventually self-consciously ) co-creating in the first place.

:up:

Well if we're 'fessing up to our plagiarism, mine's basically a paraphrasing of active inference accounts of self-organising systems.

I didn't even know that Hegel had so much as an opinion on groups and norms... You learn something new every day...

You can observe brains are embodied. — Isaac

No. I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds.

No. I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds. — unenlightened

I think it would be strange to suggest that your mind is (or is inside) my computer screen.

I have never seen a brain, only models, and possibly a piece of meat on a butcher's slab that I failed to recognise. I see your posts, and I assume you speak your mind as I do. I converse with other embodied minds and interact with animal embodied minds. — unenlightened

But you've never seen a mind either, yet you infer their existence quite happily. I'd have thought even the butcher's slab was better evidence for the existence of brains than my post is for the existence of minds.

The point is that if you want 'minds', then have at them, but if they're this spooky stuff which cannot be seen, touched or otherwise amenable to empirical investigation, then they're not constrained by the world of objects (bodies, skulls, space-time). If they are that way constrained, then they're constrained by all of the empirical world, not just the biology you learned in college.

Everything has parts. Even an atom, which in the old times was supposed to be indivisible. (Ancient Greek: a- (= not) + tomi (= cut).)
Then, asking if something is a single thing or it has parts is not a valid question because one does not exclude the other. My body is a single object but it also has parts. This reply consists of a single message which however has parts. .
Then, you have to clarify the kind of parts you are looking for. A sentence consists of words (one kind), letters (another kind), symbols (another kind), syntax parts (another kind). All these have a different function and belong to a different linguistic field.

So, mind too consists of a lot of things, of a totally different nature: memory, feelings, thoughts, etc., as well as functions: perception, thinking, imagining, reasoning, etc. Yet, it is referred to as a single thing.

But you've never seen a mind either, yet you infer their existence quite happily. I'd have thought even the butcher's slab was better evidence for the existence of brains than my post is for the existence of minds. — Isaac

Yes, and livers and kidneys too, I guess. Am I talking to a piece of meat here? Or why are we discussing meat in a thread about minds?

Am I talking to a piece of meat here? — unenlightened

Well yes. We argue about the properties that piece of meat has, but a piece of meat I certainly am.

Or... we could say I'm a mind, some metaphysical construct. I don't care which, I'm quite happy with the whole 'mind' narrative. But in this second case, why constrain the mind by some (but not all) of our empirical observations?