What is the mind?

Question

What is the mind?

Answer 1

This is a great question!  By me, the mind is our consciousness, and, if you look at it, we live in this universe that we consciously perceive each moment of our lives.  Our consciousness is also about having free will and making all those decision that effect our lives and the lives of others in the world.   Many of us can make a philosophical case for how it's all an illusion, and it doesn't matter what we do, but I'm not buying it.  It seems illogical to me that love would be so important in our lives.  I don't think that the species had to have love to survive, but many of us have found that love is extremely important in our lives.  Funny thing, that's what Jesus was talking about.  Many of us have also found that the search for meaning is extremely entertaining and important, and we like it like that!  So, on one level, the mind is a consciousness going through time and space and perceiving things about which we make value judgements.  (i.e. I like Vanilla Haagen Dass better than chocolate.)  On another level, we are all a bunch of consciousnesses bumping into each other.  Here's hoping that your consciousness is having a nice day!

Answer 2

Cognition.  The mind is the 'organ' of thought.  It has rules (Logic), and as Kant demonstrated, various innate categories that render unto consciousness an understandable reality.

Mind is the source of our being human.

Answer 3

A state of being.

Answer 4

no matter.... what is matter? never mind!

Answer 5

The mind, and life, is all a coincidence. We are a series of chemical reactions that just happened to take place. There is no miracle of creating more life; we simply take matter from somewhere else and create another series of chemicals reactions from that.

Answer 6

The mind is a mechanism by which we organize perceptions via the five senses into impressions and memory and then further into attitudes, opinions and preconceptions.  It is all the medium in which consciousness passes through.

Answer 7

"Mind" is consciousness, as opposed to simple sentience such as a worm or a virus has.

Mind is the ability of the creature to make some logic out of its knowledge. For example, a chimp can crack a coconut open. This didn't come instinctually.

But the difference between the mind of a chimp and the mind of man is found in man's name: Homo sapiens sapiens.

Sapience is knowledge. Sapient sapience is knowledge of knowledge, which is the means by which man abstracts more knowledge. Once a chimp learns to crack a nut, his learning stops there (unless helped by man.) A chimp cannot refine the milk of a coconut into medicines but man can because of the mind that he has, the only known mind in the universe that is like it.

Answer 8

There is no such thing as the mind, except as a universal which refers to each and every mind.

Your mind, my mind, is an analog built around the analog which you call consciousness.

Metaphor is what all metaphysical existents are based upon.

Answer 9

No such thing.  It all 'special effects' and a product of consciousness.