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"mind-body problem" is indeed not trivial. But the 'mind' does not have a location, it does not make sense describe it as 'in your head' or 'in your body' or a

"mind-body problem" is indeed not trivial. But the 'mind' does not have a location, it does not make sense describe it as 'in your head' or 'in your body' or anywhere else. Your brain has matter/energy. It has a location. Your mind has neither, it's a abstraction. It has no location. If it did, you'd be able to say where it was without fuss. You'd have to get into fancier metaphysics (i.e. non-materialist) to go too far beyond that.

titzer 10y ago
Not sure if you're positing dualism or just being cautious. Thought exercise: how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain (and the experience your brain is having right now)? Any answer in the form of a number implies that you don't really believe in dualism. One could do the same with other "abstractions" (quoting just because of the vagueness of the term in comments sections on hackernews). What about the operating system in your computer? Where is "Windows" or "Linux"? It's a lot of different pages of code and data in memory, but pages are just collections of cache lines and memory activation lines and disk sectors...it's hard to pin down what is "operating system" and what is not "operating system". But even so, one can easily draw a box around your physical computer and say that your operating system definitely _is_ in there. Why should your mind be any different? It is just the software of your brain. It inhabits time and space just as anything else does.
- edblarney 10y ago
  I'm not hinting at dualism, but I accept someone might infer that. "how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain " Well - if you want to map physical processes to the locations of their abstractions, you could say 'the mind is in the brain'. But if you posit your mind and brain are different things (and I think it's pragmatic to do so), then the mind does not have a location. It doesn't matter 'what particles are where'.
  - titzer 10y ago
    I don't think it follows from "the mind and brain are separate things" that the mind does not have a location.
  - armitron 10y ago
    The brain gives rise to the mind, in the same way that the physical computer, in operation, gives rise to abstract computational processes. Could you pinpoint these processes exactly in space/time? No. You can pause the computer and _inspect the state of the system_, but this not the same as pinpointing the _process itself_. The process does not exist inside the debugger. Yet you can not say that these processes do not exist or that they don't have an (abstract) location. Assuming a non-distributed model, if you kill the physical computer, you also kill whatever emergent properties it has. The same is true for brain and mind.

titzer 10y ago

Not sure if you're positing dualism or just being cautious. Thought exercise: how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain (and the experience your brain is having right now)? Any answer in the form of a number implies that you don't really believe in dualism. One could do the same with other "abstractions" (quoting just because of the vagueness of the term in comments sections on hackernews). What about the operating system in your computer? Where is "Windows" or "Linux"? It's a lot of different pages of code and data in memory, but pages are just collections of cache lines and memory activation lines and disk sectors...it's hard to pin down what is "operating system" and what is not "operating system". But even so, one can easily draw a box around your physical computer and say that your operating system definitely _is_ in there. Why should your mind be any different? It is just the software of your brain. It inhabits time and space just as anything else does.

edblarney 10y ago
I'm not hinting at dualism, but I accept someone might infer that. "how many lightyears wide would you have to draw a box that contains all the physical processes necessary to simulate your brain " Well - if you want to map physical processes to the locations of their abstractions, you could say 'the mind is in the brain'. But if you posit your mind and brain are different things (and I think it's pragmatic to do so), then the mind does not have a location. It doesn't matter 'what particles are where'.
- titzer 10y ago
  I don't think it follows from "the mind and brain are separate things" that the mind does not have a location.
- armitron 10y ago
  The brain gives rise to the mind, in the same way that the physical computer, in operation, gives rise to abstract computational processes. Could you pinpoint these processes exactly in space/time? No. You can pause the computer and _inspect the state of the system_, but this not the same as pinpointing the _process itself_. The process does not exist inside the debugger. Yet you can not say that these processes do not exist or that they don't have an (abstract) location. Assuming a non-distributed model, if you kill the physical computer, you also kill whatever emergent properties it has. The same is true for brain and mind.