Mind matters matter

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.”

- Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, an American author and humorist who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

If I keep harping on the subject of the mind; over, and over; again, and again; it is because, I am fascinated with it. To mind about the mind, matters most to me; because the world happens inside our brain: teased from the outside, or from the inside such as dreams that are worlds within; with arbitrary physical laws and narrative rules. Our life begins to end the day we matter not the mind and mind not the matters of the mind. We are the product of our mind. All what we see, all what we dream; everything that we know, all things that we are likely to know; has to come from the motion of our mind.

In fact, we are what our mind is. What mind is to man is matter is to universe. Without both, mind and matter, it matters “nothing.” That in fact is what we were, before creation or the big bang: Nothing. If mind is matter, matter is the substance that makes our brain, the originator of the mind. All human matters too are that: the product of the mind.

Shifts

Everything, all transformations, all cultural and political shifts that occur, is the product of the mind; originating from the motion of the mind. In fact, there is an interesting episode about the motion of the mind. Leonardo Da Vinci, the creator of “Mona Lisa” which has been acclaimed as the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world, in his Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura), advises painters to pay particular attention to the motions of the mind, *moti mentali*. “The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure,” he advises; otherwise the figure will be considered twice dead: “dead because it is a depiction; and dead yet again in not exhibiting motion either of the mind or of the body.” Thus, mind is not only an essential element of human existence; but it is also a property of the universe, the cosmos; something beyond the merely quantifiable.

For us, the only reality we can perceive is the one our brain allows us to apprehend with the mind. Without getting lost in the immense maze of cognitive experiments that are, performed these days; it is clear that the brain integrates sensorial stimuli from the outside and re-creates our sense of reality from within. This has all sorts of implications to the nature of reality, and to how we define what is real. For something to be real, an individual must be conscious of it.

However, consciousness itself is a question unanswered: where does it originate from, reside in, and go to when we lose it? Even though experiments are, on going in this field; no universally agreed to answer is available as yet. The one thing that is certain, consciousness rises in the mind, which itself is the work of the brain. Nevertheless, what is agreed is that there are levels of consciousness, from that of machines, animals, to where humanity blends with divinity.

Communicate

Sometimes a subject is conscious but is unable to communicate with the external world. For instance, a photodiode is conscious because it turns on when the light is on and off when the light is off and its consciousness has two states, on and off, and minimal information. It is then legitimate to ask whether other animals have minds or whether machines can one day have them too.

In the field of medicine, a human expert is still the ultimate arbiter of the state of consciousness of another human. However, unless there is some level of subjective understanding of the action that is undertaken, there is no consciousness to speak of. Perhaps when cell phones start chatting with one another, we should then be duly impressed about the consciousness of machines. Until then, and as commonly understood, consciousness needs a conscious observer; and for an individual, consciousness is in the personal and immediate rather than in the absolute and infinite. Thus, in order to facilitate things, let us say that mind is a faculty that conscious, intelligent beings have; giving them the ability to think, feel, and reflect about the world and the subjective experiences it presents.

We play with three words, “brain,” “mind” and “consciousness,” and possibly a fourth, “intelligence.” Brain is easy. All vertebrate animals have it in their skull; irrespective of whether they use it or not and it is the central organ of the nervous system.

Mind, consciousness, and intelligence are hard. From a scientific perspective, all three are products of the brain; and brain is matter, nothing else. The question then is to figure out how the brain does it: how we can ask profound questions and write essays about them while dogs and chimps cannot, even though they are arguably intelligent. There are levels of intelligence, levels of consciousness, and levels of mindfulness. So, one of the questions about origin of mind is how it evolved to the level we see today.

Conscious

Thus, the wonder of the mind lies not in some sort of unknowable property of the cosmos, but in the fact that we do have a mind to ponder such things. The answer is within our heads, and the challenge is to find it by taking an objective look, without being able to step outside of the mind. In philosophy of mind, the relationship between mind and matter claims that mind and matter are separate categories. Mind-body dualism claims that neither the mind nor matter can be, reduced to each other in any way.

Western dualist philosophical traditions, as exemplified by Descartes, equate mind with the conscious self, and theorise on consciousness based on mind/body dualism. By contrast, most Eastern philosophies draw a metaphysical line between consciousness and matter - where matter includes both body and mind. They do not divide mind from matter; the observer, from the observed; the subject, from the object. All that may be, but where is the source of the mind? We know that the brain is its source. However, mind may be the property of the brain, but how did it reach this level of cognitive complexity through evolution? Why humans alone inherited this power and not other being on earth? To answer this question, you have to go back in time. The story starts 13.7 billion years ago. A commonly accepted scientific theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.

According to the Big Bang theory, 13.7 billion years ago, something very interesting happened. A primeval atom of infinitely small density, created this immense, ever expanding physical universe we see today. Hence, never under-estimate the small, be it man or substance. From this, everything else came about. When we are born and come into the world for the first time, the basic fuel we use is oxygen.

Initially, this oxygen gives us the power to grow, eat and then start to take in other fuel sources such as food. Just as a star dies when its fuel source hydrogen dries up; our bodies die when we stop breathing. Everything we do, including our thought processes depend on incoming oxygen.

If during the process of evolution, oxygen was not produced; life as we know it would not exist. Hence, we are all, results of evolution. Whether it was accident or not is another matter, not the matters that matter.

The fact is we are here; and the mind of Mankind produced human imagination: the source of the tremendous power of Mankind.

The source of the mind means the source of the universe because the mind is the product of the universe. Man and his experience of the world are within the mind.

Mind appears as waking or dream and disappears as deep sleep. When conscious, one perceives the world within the mind. Thus, the mind is also the source from where the universe rises. The self is the universe. Discovering this truth is the pursuit of Mankind.

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