The Mind

When I speak of the mind I refer to the upper level of our consciousness, where we spend most of our awareness. There are lower level functions of our brains involved in perception of the world and synthesis of those perceptions into a mental representation that operate at a level below that of the mind, although both upper and lower level functions operate biologically in similar ways (both are functions of the chemical and electrical (and possibly other) behaviors of neurons). In a normal brain the mind is not aware of these functions, only their effect, which is a consistant, stable and well integrated representation of the world.

The entirety of what we precieve around us, as detected by our senses and reconstructed by the faculties of our brains, is a model of the real world, constructed and contained entirely within our minds. We normally operate within this model as if it were in fact the real world, but it is not. It is a highly filtered and processed view, with many assumptions so deeply ingrained that we no longer notice them. Some of the assumptions are things we learned as infants (i.e., the apparently Newtonian movement of a thrown object), others may be related to the way our brains develop physically (i.e., what kinds of stimuli produce a pleasure response).

We are probably born with most of the mental faculty required to build a mental model of the world around us, but I think that the details of that model are defined only after we gain some control of our senses and, as very small children, begin exploring the world and discovering relationships between objects and events. The innate abilities of our brains assemble our observations and experiences into a model with predictive powers. The accuracy of this model is limited in much the same way our senses are limited. We have difficulty conceiving of infrared or x-rays as 'colors' of light, because we cannot preceive them as such. We find the predictions of Einstein's theory of General Relativity under extreme conditions (the warping of space-time around massive objects for instance) counter-intuitive because our senses are only accurate enough to allow us to intuit a model with Newtonian physics.

It is important to realize that any reasoning we do is from the perspective of our mental model. An 'objective' or omniscent viewpoint, while a useful tool, is not truely objective. It is a model that we use to make predictions about what a hypothetical objective observer would believe. It should be obvious that the model of an objective observer is not really an objective observer, and will not make predictions that are completely consistant with an actual objective observer. Perception is inaccurate, therefore all models of things perceived are to some extent inaccurate, and so predictions made with them are inaccurate. To act otherwise is to deny our basic nature. Any proposition made on behalf of the objective observer must be credible when restated in the context of our own personal viewpoint, for the two are simply different facades upon the same knowledge.