and foot-notes of an early-evening.
Later, they fade into the darker dreams
and tangled glades of memory.
There are also more extravagant views, held by some mind-speakers, that offer to “who’s” who have no interest in their “where’s,” the comforting belief that they are free to not need a where—certainly not one located in the brain, and not even in the mind. This is the path to an ecstasy which requires that one be out of (one’s) mind—a venture that also seeks a where-free location. Such “where-less who’s” are, however, most vulnerable in the early morning hours—when, sitting on the pot, they find they do not entirely exist as fiction or spirit. But in other more fanciful times and places, they can avoid sharing the same modalities as do their more concrete selves, and so need not much bother with the evidence that upholds their actual existence.
There is a middle ground that has more general appeal to doubters of mind-brain identity, for it does not enirely reject the evident relationship between “who’s” and “where’s.” Instead, it offers a view of their communal co-existence in time and place—the belief that for an event to be characterized as an occurrence, it must be within a physical framework at a certain time in a particular place. Thoughts in the mind and actions in the brain, on this account, are described as simultaneous events—and through formal equivalence, can be considered identical. On a different level of relationship, however, these may not be causally related—little can be assumed about mental function by evoking future findings in the brain: (Post-hoc non ergo propter-hoc). What can be said—is that prior brain findings (a tumor, say) will probably result in certain mental behavior. Taken more generally, however, “mind” (everything we can think) is not (yet) an entity subject to a causal explanation through reference to specific brain-events. The expansion of neurological research would need further reduction—and regimentation—of what we consider mind-events in order for an equivalence with brain-events to be reached. I hope that this will not (again) become the “true epistemic path”—as it was, say, with logical-positivism. Otherwise, imagination is in trouble.
One argument supporting the dualistic view holds that terms such as “events” and “occurrences” are merely codifications—and thus, abstractions—of times past or future. There is no denying that in every time and place, we face a programmatic uncertainty about the nature and location of times and places—even to the point where such locutions as “each” and “every,” and “before” and “after,” presume a totality that does not reflect a more co-responsive view of experience.
One solution—of a religious kind—to such uncertainty, is to suppose that all variables and possibles come together in a mind—not yours or mine—but in an ideal mind which contains all the possible variations in existence—past and future. This thesis, among its other virtues, provides defense against anxieties about the threat of nothing—the fear that when the physical brain stops, the mind just ends. It is a comforting faith to believe that one’s individual demise is not a chance occurrence, but instead, a proper part of cosmic necessity—a necessity given its law (and reality) by the mind (not brain) of a necessary Deity.
Given this, we can look forward, when we die, to our small ripple rejoining the larger waves off shore—and so we continue to “exist.” But this remains a considerable “given.” Remember Kant’s assertion that “existence is not a predicate.”
The thesis of an ideal mind can also be found in a secular context—when it is considered to be—at least—co-extensive with a brain. Such a mind-brain reveals itself in the expansion of our (computational) efforts to encompass and encode the material processes of mental function. One aspect of such a program (the speculative aspect) would be to give us a this-worldly version of the transcendental mind: If we could get it all together—if we could put all the variables, past and future, that are implicit in experience, into one grand self-correcting scheme—we could then (progressively) grasp what knowing, and what knowing that we know (and so on)—finally comes to. In such a finality, there will be nothing left behind—or yet to come—that we do not, or cannot, know.
But we draw back from such improbability by saying that mind, like brain, is in a place—perhaps the same place. But the difficulties in locating “place” (more so—“same-place”) bring to mind the old academic verities where acceptance of an existential thesis was gained through mutual accord in a true belief about what there is. But this attempt to fix “place” and circumscribe “existence” founders on the problems of delimitation and modality: “When is the place referred to?” “Is its existence actual (a there and then), possible (contingent-on-being experienced), necessary (but unknowable in its immeasurable completeness)?”
One solution would be to avoid such epistemic complexity and join (however reluctantly) with the forces that categorically champion places as being the concrete locations we desire: All spaces are places. It can then be said: There are no spaces in (that occur to) the mind (however absent-minded or far-fetched)—that are not places in the body, most notably, in the brain.
But where does this get us? Of course, adherents of the opposing view—that mind is not reducible to location—can be dismissed as a grab-bag of myopic Hegelians, retired relativists, nostalgic flower-children, and other skeptics and visionaries whose interests are variously directed to undermining reductionist theories—and by so doing, to give credence to their preferences for wandering from concrete place to open space.
Such skeptics typically don’t believe that translations between languages (mind-talk and brain-talk) can be definitive (salve-veritate)—because truth is not always the goal. They also don’t believe that explanatory theories are cumulative (contra Hegel). What they believe, instead, is that theories are only richer or more meager—depending on how they explain what we use, flee from, or marvel at. Simply put: the analytic, pragmatic, aesthetic, when extended beyond academic civility, speak different languages. At stake, here, is not the notion that mind is “located in” or “the same as” the brain. It is, rather, the poverty of brain-theory’s explanatory function as well as the weakness of its predictive power—when it comes to issues that are mind-specific—emotion, volition, appreciation, meaning, morality, imagination— to dredge up an embattled term—“subjective.” These are issues that have different explanatory parameters than do “objective” ones.
The inter-translateability between quality and quantity remains a question. In cosmological theory, the hyphen in space-time is as uneasy as it is in mind-body or in inside-outside; “unobservable” and “immeasurable” are offered as attributes of real entities—as in “dark matter.” In political theory, “freedom” and “equality” vacillate between support and antagonism, as do “progress” and “justice.” Language, in such cases, stretches to accommodate them.
Advocates of separate theories of “mind” and “brain” are heartened in their beliefs when they peer across the fence and see how the advocates of “mind-as-brain” fare in trying to map the “soft” problems of ethics, aesthetics, private consciousness—as well, indeed, as the ”hard” ones of incessant wars and observational indeterminacy—onto a neuronal matrix. The (soft) question: “What makes people act this way?” can be answered by the (hard) rejoinder: “We’ll soon have an organic handle on all those differences in belief, and we’ll be able to offer explanations (as well as cures) for every brain-place that is their origin. Unfortunately, we have so far been hindered by atavars (like you) of mind-speak—those poetic-psychologic-sociologic-spiritualistic-babblers—who refuse to come around to accepting the one place that (soon—soon) offers a full account.”
In contrast, the mind—as the mind-ists insist—is not simply a location. Rather, it has places which it shares (physically but indeterminately) with the
