geordief

Yes.I have difficulty** following the arguments made in this and other threads and so sometimes I like to take simple scenarios and imagine how they might play out in conditions that are easier to imagine in physical everyday terms. Could we imagine an episode of Startreck where Capt Kirk comes across a civilisation in the Bismarkia Galaxy where the population is under the impression that all individual decisions have to be assessed by a central decision processing system before they are allowed to be acted upon? That would make their society very unweildy but might confer some advantages. Obviously one of the more nubile star farers on board the Space ship could be caught prisoner whilst investigating the planet and would have to be extricated somehow ,possibly by some kind of a mind hack where the decision making process of the captors was temporarily short circuited by some fancy piece of equipment and so onto the next episode. I think that might be the implication of the OP ,to find practical applications for philosophical questions /dilemmas **because of my poor reasoning abilities.

OK

Bruce Almighty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Almighty Or does the extrapolation make no sense to you?

Would that be material for a Jim Careyesque film where instead of being omnipotent the main character learns that he or she is not responsible for their own actions? They would have to convince their company that this was the case -and that it applied to them too(because he had seen the light and was 100% aware of this) Are their situations where mundane interrelationships would change as a result of 1,2 or more people being on board? Would people ,perhaps carry chips on their person to indicate to their companions whether or not a likely action would be carried out faithfully by the individual involved (if external circumstances did not intervene to much? Rather like medium range weather forecasting...)

Some kind of a book,play or collection (?) about her later years coming out I think. They played this version of Pete Seeger's song whilst discussing her on the radio with the author.

Might need a bit more than that if you are Trump.

Was he wearing boots? Could be why he drowned .

Back to the drawing board (you are running rings around me) Unless we are talking about a Glass Onion class of the Concentric Universe.

In the Concentric Universe.

A phone in the house used to be a status symbol- think Hyacinth Bouquet (I never got a phone until I was in my 50s -still awkward with them ) And you do have to keep them clean.You should see my remote control.

So long as it doesn't become a billabong? I am fascinated by how the human (or from other species) mind developed. When ,at age 11 I left that school I mentioned before where the teacher let me recite Flannan Isle in return for getting out early the last thing he said to the class was "Never forget where you came from" Our progenitors go back all the way to the primordial swamp It has to be fascinating to try and understand how those minds worked at the beginning of their evolutionary paths. I wouldn't mind betting that we carry quite a few remnants with us still.

I am trying to imagine a situation in a society where communication techniques were very primitive(lots of gestures and some vocalisations?) If you wanted someone else to pay attention to something would you point to your eyes and the object that had to be attended to? Would that finger be pointing at the seeing mechanism in general (and paying attention)? Would a "mind" be implied by such a gesture even if the word itself had not been designated as such? Would a word corresponding to our "mind" have appeared in due course simply to describe what people were actually doing to survive?

A model that appears as if it is alive** when it is just an (approximate) tool? Or is it just forever out of reach of analysis (the "mind" ,not the mental activity) for the reason that we cannot look directly at ourselves and so the "mind" cannot interrogate the "mind" without intermediary? So a subjective understanding of the mind is impossible leaving only the objective analysis of the brain's activity and what we hypothesize might account for our subjective experience of what we call the mind. I wonder again whether the concept of the mind applies to all cultures(but how might we show that the concept in one culture applied to the same phenomenon in another culture even if the name seemed the same or similar?) **Is the "mind" the seat of what it feels to be alive or are some people quite unaware of having a "mind" and still feel quite alive?

Is it accurate to think of minds as being composed of distinct actors, which may not necessarily be in direct communication with each other? We naturally lump them all together as one but it is more collegiate. An ad hoc arrangement with a common interest in survival? No I am not familiar with that term or theory(will take a look at the article though)

Thanks.Good reads. That is how I see it regarding extensions.(along the lines of the first link) What if two are more people share the some mental prosthesis? Do they share the same mind? Suppose two people have their brain circuitry connected to the same thing(the controls of a car ,say) They both drive the car (and crash unless they learn to establish a modus vivendi) Are their minds connected or do we just have two minds trying to do the same job in two different ways? Is that example really any different from the close collaboration that exists between friends and colleagues where lifetime bonds can be formed? My approach has been to view the brain as a part of the body. A specialized ,signal processing and channeling one but still the body. As we seem to be saying, the "body" can extend outward to distances only limited by the speed of light and the concomitant relativistic effects. I am still left with the conundrum of understanding what I still want to call "my mind" The concept seems to serve no purpose and feels like a useful fiction but I still need to understand the mechanism behind creating this concept . I wonder whether there are cultures who never invented the concept of the mind (cultures which don't value the individual as an element of the group?) Or is the idea of a mind hard wired into us all and just waits for the right description of the phenomenon to recognize it I think it is only in fairly recent times has the idea of the brain being "plastic" come to the fore** In the sense ,I think that it deforms in a useful way that improves or adapts its function. Previously it must have been appreciated that the brain was not set in stone but that it ,on the one hand increased its abilities through use whilst on the other deteriorated through disease etc. I struggle to answer your point (1) but I feel there should surely be some characteristics of the mind that are separate from its plasticity. The difficuly may be because it is so hard (for me) to define the mind as dissociated from the brain activity. So much that I question whether it exists at all and is an illusion. But what ,I ask myself creates this illusion, if it is an illusion? ** I can't remember the term being used when I was much younger

When I said "a shape" I was imagining a moving shape but with as many dimensions as might be needed to describe brain activity. I don't think it could be visualized except mathematically and even then I am not sure how categorizing the different shapes (if it were possible) could be used to describe different states of the mind. How many states of the mind could there be,I wonder? The Eskimos have dozens of words to describe "white".Could there be a huge number of different states of the mind that we are unaware of? And something external could be affecting both? I don't see that. If we can separate brain activity from "the mind" then I would imagine the two might work together as a conjoined entity I can see the brain activity being open to the external world but the mind ,imo only communicates with that brain activity and nothing else(unless one posits a universal mind-as some apparently do) That might be a kind of "back door"

By "both" do you mean (a) what we call the mind and (b) the physic activity in the brain?

The paths and correlations could be described as having a "shape" though,couldn't they? Obviously not some kind of a 3 dimensional or even 4 dimensional volume but (I think I understand that Hilbert space might describe this) a multi dimensional set of relationships that would have a dynamic form or shape. What we experience as the mind appears to me to be featureless ,like a screen upon which the physical workings of the brain are somehow projected.(sounds a bit like Socrates' or Plato's cave) It feels like the mind is what orchestrates the activity in the brain but when you look for the mind ,there is nothing there. Like it is a fiction that the various parts of the brain create to synthesise everything. When I think of "the mind" part of me thinks it is everything and part of me thinks there is nothing there.(no bloody moving parts) Just checked ,we are in General Philosophy so things don't have to make sense here. ;-)

Is the mind just the (shifting and responsive) "shape" of the brain? After all,"shape" is another word that may be as hard to define as the mind. It is equally defined by its environment and you cannot say that you can "touch" a shape.

Do you think the mind can be said to follow any procedures which do not vary from one mind to another or one circumstance to another? Are there things that can be aid about the concept of "mind" that apply in all circumstances? Or are all minds just a mirror image of the circumstances they are embedded in and react to? Are all "rules of the mind" purely ad hoc or might we say there are distinguishing features of the phenomenon that only apply to minds and so define them?

You just couldn't resist ,could you?

The last Sami I spoke to bought us youngsters two meals in exchange for ordering a beer at the same time. They had strict drinking laws in Norway then (probably especially up North) and you could only buy a drink with a meal. That must have been reindeer season I guess (this was on the coast)and they may have been taking a rest after a long treck across country. I think they suffered from the effects of Chernobyl so I don't know if their lifestyle has continued apace since then or if some of them have had to leave the reindeer industry/go on the dole. Norwegian beer was top class but very expensive .

"Roll on ,John" Here Dylan shows just why he was famously described as not being a very good singer He also recorded a tribute to John Lennon with a song again titled "Roll on,John" Some 50 years later .The voice still serviceable then. Think it has gone now sadly.

Yes ,I know it is available I have read that it is effective but less so than the Covid vaccine. I have a penchant for putting things on the long finger and especially so when it comes to visiting the doctor.... The reason ,incidentally that my second shingles infection also went untreated was that it also , naturally showed up on a Sunday -as well as my being convinced that you could not get shingles twice. (so that I ignored the signs until it was quite late and so had to go to hospital for a week)

My partner got an attack of shingles ,naturally on a Sunday at the beginning of this year. We were unable to even see a doctor until the following day. I knew how important it is to take the antiviral as soon as possible and I happened to have some left over medication from my own bout of shingles around 8 years previous to that. I had kept them for such an eventuality(I have already had shingles twice) I thought I should ring around the hospitals and the all night medical numbers for advice as to whether we should use these date expired medicines until such time as we could get proper medicine from a doctor. I was repeatedly told not to do this (some circumlocutions) and as a result we started the treatment some 36 hours later than we otherwise might have. Should I have disregarded this advice and started the treatment anyway with the old medication? (acyclovir ,from memory). As it turned out my partner has had to be prescribed the shingles antiviral 3 times since and ,some 10 months on from the initial infection is just now ,hopefully putting it behind her. I understand that the medication I had had doubtless lost efficacy but felt they might have been of some use in the circumstances . But I didn't want to go against the medical advice I was given over the phone.