The Meaning of Mind: Philosophy for the 21st Century

The term "Mind" is the most inclusive word, embracing all human experience, thought perceptions, knowledge, feelings and beliefs. Mind could be thought of as an all-inclusive container of all experiences that tends to expand and contract.

A term that is sometimes interchangeable with “Mind” is “Psyche.” We speak of psychology rather than mindology. The adjective “mental” derives from the Greek word “mens” or mind and suggests that there is a subcategory of events that is in the mind and there are other events outside the mind.

On close inspection of the nature of the really real, the reader will discover that this is a mistake. Everything is in the mind and “mental” points to this all-inclusive container. Everything in the universe is “mental.” The universe, however large it may be, is mental – in the mind.

A deep question is: How do we know if other creatures have minds? The answer is not easy. Healthy humans have an innate sense that other humans have minds. You can argue that most humans assume that other humans have minds in a fuzzy imprecise way and there are exceptions.

Humans are mostly interested in the behavior of others and often ignore or misunderstand the mind that lies behind these behaviors. Some diseases of the brain destroy recognition of the mindfulness of others.

Babies scan the faces of their mother to find out how she is responding to them and events around them. Babies will usually go with the mother’s visible facial expressions suggesting that they assume that she has a mind that understands what is going on. The baby may be responding to facial expressions, however, with no concept of the mindfulness of others. Eye contact is thought to be a signal of the mindfulness of the other, but this is an arbitrary criterion.

Tracking and copying the behavior of others involves the assumption of another mind. The concept of responsibility is based on the human ability to respond to the needs of others. The concept of empathy is based on the human ability to respond to the feelings of others.

The idea of sentient beings extends to other animals. Sentience is a composite property of brains that varies approximately with the size and complexity of the brain. Thus, you could argue that whale’s, apes and humans have similar but not identical sentience. While dogs are sentient beings with feelings and behaviors that are mostly congruent with human feelings and behaviors, they have smaller, less complex brains and can be considered to operate at a different level of sentience.