What is the human mind? - Health Preservation Learning Network

What is the human mind?

What is the human mind? Man is composed of soul and body, and less than one in ten thousand people are born supernatural. If you understand the essence of the mind, you will understand how to control the function of life with the mind. Share a person's mind, what is the following?

What is the human mind 1 Our body is made up of cells, and cells are made up of molecular atoms. However, we not only have a body, but also a mind, which can think, have emotions and secular desires. But what is a brain? Is it a substance? Is it also made up of atoms?

Mind and soul are often regarded as synonyms. When a person is alive, the words mind and soul can be used interchangeably, but if the person is dead and the soul is still there, then the soul is usually called the soul. In this paper, we don't strictly distinguish between these two concepts.

Throughout the ages, countless wise men have thought about the secrets of the mind. Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, believed that the mind existed before we were born, and it existed in the world of ideas, which is a world different from the real world. When we are born, the soul enters our body, just like being born again. Ordinary people's souls are incomplete, only half of them, either male or female, are perfect together.

Plato himself is different. His soul is complete, and he doesn't need to fall in love or fall in love with himself. This is the so-called Plato's spiritual love method, which was later extended to the so-called pure love involving only the spirit and not the body.

During the Warring States Period, Zhuangzi and Keiko came to the bridge and watched the fish swimming in the river. Zhuangzi said, How happy these fish are. Keiko asked, you are not a fish, how do you know that fish is happy? Zhuangzi asked, you are not me. How do you know I didn't know fish were happy? Here they are talking about spirit. If you are not a fish, can you know the psychological state of the fish? If you are not me, can you know my state of mind?

Not to mention the mentality, it seems difficult to determine whether others have hearts. Imagine, suppose a person fights, breaks a person's head and finds that it is full of circuits. Do you think that man has a heart?

The above example, Plato's point of view can only be said to be poetic imagination, not serious theory, and Zhuangzi Keiko just raised questions. Let's take a look at philosophers' explorations of the essence of the mind.

1, psychosomatic dualism

This view holds that the mind and the body are essentially completely different things. The body belongs to matter, but the mind does not belong to matter. The most famous supporter of psychosomatic dualism is French mathematician and philosopher Descartes, who put forward the philosophical proposition of "I think, therefore I am".

Why is the mind and body fundamentally different? Descartes put forward several arguments, one of which is this. The body can be cut into different parts, while the mind cannot be divided, so the two are completely different. This argument is controversial. Is the mind really inseparable? We'll discuss this later.

The mind is different from the body. Does the mind have a place in space? Where is it? The ancients in our country thought that the heart lived in the heart, which was also reflected in our words. The heart of the heart originally refers to the heart, for example, the word heart is below the word thought. Descartes guessed that the mind is in the brain, because we generally think that we are behind our eyes, and the brain is behind our eyes.

How does the mind control the behavior of the body? For example, I want to watch a movie now, and I can control my hand to turn on the computer to watch it online. Descartes believes that there is a part of the brain called the pineal gland, through which thinking affects our behavior. The pineal gland is like a receiver of a radio. It receives signals from the brain and then transmits them to other parts of the body. The body also transmits signals to the brain through the pineal gland.

This theory of Descartes conflicts with modern science. Because according to the scientific concept, the brain activity can be explained by the physical and chemical changes of neurons, and now the mind has to interfere with the brain activity, which is simply disturbing the order!

Leibniz believes that the mind and the brain are independent and do not affect each other. But how to explain some synchronization between them? For example, when the body is short of water, the mind feels thirsty, and when it wants to walk, it will stretch its legs. Leibniz said that this is because when God created the universe, the mind and the body were synchronized and there was no interaction between them. Just like two alarm clocks are aimed at time at first, and then they are synchronized, although there is no interaction between them. This idea is called harmony theory.

There are still many questions to be answered in psychosomatic dualism. Do vegetarians have hearts? If you never regained consciousness, did your mind disappear or did your mind leave your body? If there is no soul, is it necessary to maintain vegetative life? You can ask further, do animals have hearts?

Although it can't be said that the mind-body dualism is absolutely wrong, after all, we don't know what the correct mind theory is now. But it does conflict with the concept of modern science, because modern science also regards everything in the world as material, while psychosomatic dualism regards the mind as something different from material. In addition, both the pineal gland theory of the mind and the theory of harmony first are even more inconsistent with science.

In some legends, we can find some evidence to support the dualism of body and mind, and the mind can exist without the body. For example, the near-death experience is such an example. It is often reported that when a patient was seriously ill and was rescued, his soul suddenly left his body, and he could no longer feel the pain. All the important events he experienced in his life were played quickly. Passing through a dark tunnel, there is light at the end, listening to wonderful music, and his deceased relatives are waiting for them there.

Some people are dying, their souls are hanging in the air, and they see themselves lying in the hospital bed, and the doctor is saving himself. In either case, the soul will suddenly return to the body and return to reality. Do souls sometimes float out and never come back? I don't know, because if so, that person won't come back to life and can't tell us what happened to him.

Is the OBE true or false, or is it an illusion caused by brain dysfunction? Someone has come up with some ways to test them. For example, hanging some special paintings on the wall can't be seen in bed, but if the soul floats, it will definitely notice. Some people put special props on the operating table for the same reason as before. But people who have experienced OBE never say that they saw those props when they woke up. This shows that out-of-body experience is probably an illusion.

In addition to near-death experience, another related legend is reincarnation, that is, children recall their "past lives." The University of Virginia School of Medicine has done special research in this field. In 2005, it published a book "Previous Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Past Life Memory", which contains a large number of cases. For example, there is a policeman in new york. He was killed in a robbery in 1992, and his heart and lungs were broken by bullets.

Five years later, his daughter gave birth to a son who was born with imperfect pulmonary artery and heart problems. Later, the child always said that he was a policeman. Speaking of the past, he remembered the small animals raised by his mother, and many living habits were the same as those of the police. For more information about this book, please read Fan Ye's article, an epidemiological study on reincarnation. He also thought of the experiment to test the theory of reincarnation, "How to test the hypothesis of soul reincarnation with statistical experiments".

Are these things really reincarnation? Or is it just a coincidence, or is the memory of the parties wrong, or is someone falsifying the facts? I don't know, at least it looks unreliable and makes people feel superstitious. Whether this is really the case remains to be further studied.

If the soul can leave the body, there are many puzzling problems. We need to see with our eyes and speak with our mouths. If the soul leaves the body, what does it use to see things? It has no mouth. How does it communicate with other souls? Do you communicate telepathically? Is there privacy in directly sensing what other souls are thinking? Is heaven like this? It's harder for the soul to be as supernatural as in the movie. How can you make it without hands and feet?

Apart from unreliable rumors, there is no credible evidence that the soul can exist without the body.

What is the human mind? Mystic: The mind is a ghost.

If you have seen ghost movies or horror movies, you can intuitively understand what a ghost is.

Ghosts in Japanese ghost films have a very thick foundation on their faces and may climb out of the TV screen. Most ghosts in Hong Kong ghost films are beautiful, but their bodies are translucent, they can walk through walls and have various superpowers. Many ghosts in American ghost films are not human. They have horrible faces, long nails and sharp teeth, just like monsters.

For a mystic, the human mind is the soul, and the soul is such a ghost and ghost. This ghost may be reincarnated from generation to generation and become a human or other animal. This kind of ghost may also go to heaven or hell and accept rewards and punishments.

In short, mystics believe that the body may die, rot or turn into a pile of loess or dust, but the soul will not die. The soul will continue to exist in some form after the death of the body and enter some other world. People with religious beliefs, whether they believe in Buddhism, Christ, God or Jade Emperor, mostly belong to some form of mysticism.

The greatest advantage of mysticism is that it can give people psychological comfort. Everyone is afraid of death. If a person believes that he will not really die, and the soul will continue to exist after physical death, then this person may not be so afraid of death.

Mysticism can also lead people to be good. If a person believes that he has done something bad, he will go to hell and suffer after death; Do good by yourself and go to heaven to enjoy happiness after death. Then this person may do as many good things as possible and do less bad things.

The biggest disadvantage of mysticism is that it is incompatible with the most popular scientific world view at present. People who hold mysticism stand are either ignorant people with low education, brave anti-wise people, cowards with high education, or pretentious literati. In the eyes of scientists, these people can generally be called fools.

Once a person is labeled as "stupid", he is excluded from the circle of rational communication. What he thinks no longer has any serious significance except making people laugh. This may be excommunication in a scientific society.

I think this is why people would rather give up those psychological comforts than be called stupid.

Dualism: both heart and brain.

The most famous dualist is Descartes. Descartes is an outstanding mathematician and philosopher, and a lesser physicist and physiologist. He believes that all animals are complex machines, and so is the human body. But people are different from stones, reeds, clocks and tigers. People have a soul as well as a body. Nothing else has a soul.

Dualists believe that soul and body can be distinguished. The body belongs to the category of matter, while the soul does not. Matter is what physicists promise to exist, such as fermions and bosons, and what they make up is more macroscopic. These things are roughly huge and occupy a certain position in physical time and space, which can be described by four-dimensional coordinates. In a word, there is no difference between dualists and physicalists for things like matter.

The uniqueness of dualists is that they think there is something called soul in this world, which is not made of matter. They have no volume and occupy no space. The uniqueness of the soul is that it can think and have psychological activities. Matter, on the other hand, can't think and has no psychological activity.

Descartes believed that the pineal gland deep in the human brain is the location of the soul. The human soul controls the human brain through the pineal gland, and the brain can control the limbs.

Unfortunately, modern scientific research has found that this small pineal gland is not as important as Descartes thought. It is only used for secreting melatonin and regulating circadian rhythm. And Descartes didn't make it clear how a soul completely different from the body controls the body through the pineal gland.

This is also the biggest trouble that dualists face. They can't explain how two different things, soul and matter, interact. Why does the physical event of "hitting my toe" lead to the psychological event of "feeling pain"? Why does the psychological event of "wanting to drink water" lead to the physiological event of "reaching for a cup"?

The difference between dualists and mystics is that dualism has scientific common sense and thinks that the world is described by physical laws. Dualists believe that people have souls, but it does not necessarily mean that souls are immortal and will go to heaven or hell or even reincarnation. Dualists just want to save the human soul from the scientific world view and draw a reservation for it.

At present, this work is not successful.

Behaviorist: no mind, only behavior.

Friends who study psychology must be familiar with the word behaviorism. Behaviorism in psychology, represented by Watson and Skinner in the United States, holds that psychological research should focus on objectively measurable behaviors, rather than on those unobservable thoughts, desires, motives, consciousness and so on. This is the so-called methodological behaviorism.

Methodological behaviorism was later replaced by cognitive paradigm based on analogy between human brain and computer, but its influence on philosophy has continued to this day. Philosophical behaviorism, called logical behaviorism, is represented by British Ryle and American Quine. By the way, Quine and Skinner are classmates of Harvard and have always been good friends.

Logical behaviorism is now regarded as the standard to test whether a thing has a soul. If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck and barks like a duck, then it is a duck. If all the external behaviors of a thing are exactly the same as those of a willing person, then we say that this person has a heart.

In other words, mind is behavior or behavioral tendency. To say that a person feels pain means that he may let out a cry of "Ah" and then avoid the stimulus that makes him feel pain. Saying that a person is thirsty means that he is more likely to find water to drink, even if he is not looking for water to drink at present.

To paraphrase Quine's famous saying in physicalism: "Without physical change, there is no change". In view of people's psychological state, we can say that "there is no change without behavior or behavioral tendency".

Ryle's behaviorism thought began with his criticism of Descartes, who called dualism a ghost in a machine. Since the human body is considered as a complex and sophisticated machine, why do you need a supernatural orb to operate this machine?

Turing test also embodies the spirit of logical behaviorism. If a machine can perfectly behave like a human, it can be regarded as having the level of human intelligence. Behaviorism doesn't care about inner feelings, subjective feelings, only external manifestations, only observable behaviors.

What is the human mind? 3 What is "heart"?

The mind is a very mysterious thing.

This is not the brain,

Because the brain is the floorboard of the brain, cerebellum and brain stem;

It is not a heart, because the heart only acts as a pump;

It is not a soul or a spirit.

In short, the mind is not our body,

But it's in our bodies,

It looks like an organ, but I can't find it.

According to this study,

It exists in every organ,

It exists in every inch of skin,