Tag: mind

Arthur S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

“The mind has by its selective power fitted the processes of Nature into a frame of law of a pattern largely of its own choosing; and in the discovery of this system of law the mind may be regarded as regaining from Nature that which the mind has put into Nature.”

He declared that the signifi‭cance of the world could not be ‬
uncovered in science; instead, “we ha‭ve to build the spiritual world ‬
out of symbols taken from our own personality, as we build the scientific world out of the symbols of the mathematician.”

We have a task before us, according to Eddington: “We are
going to build a World—a physical world which will give a shadow
performance of the drama enacted in the world of experience.”The language of the “shadow performance,” here is so distinctively Eddington’s own that it is difficult ‭not to take him at his word on ‬
the dependence of the physical world on the human mind. However
that may be, there is a definite ‭and distinctively nominalistic theme ‬
in Eddington’s notions of world building and the selective influence
of mind. This nominalistic theme ‭is intimately related to Edding-‬
ton’s epistemology and his theory‭ of mind. They are worth some ‬
examination in the present context.

‭The interpretation that is most natural ‬here is that for Eddington, “the mi‭nd” selects particular systems of ‬ “relations and relata,” in the process of world building, so as to include particular laws of nature within the mathematical structure, so generated; and within the favored structure, the implicated laws are simply true by stipulation.

  1. See in particular, Bertrand Russell (1927), p. 226; and the discussion in Steven French (2003), p. 236.
  2. See Eddington (1920) “The Meaning of Matter and the Laws of Nature According to the Theory of Relativity,” ‭Mind, 29, 114, p. 145: “…it is the ‬mind‭ which from the crude substratum constructs the familiar picture of a ‬substantial world around us;” p. 153: “According to this view matter can scarcely be said to exist apart from ‭mind.” See also Eddington, below, e.g., ‬p. 327, “…the world-stuff behind the pointer readings [of physics] is of nature continuous with the mind;” and p. 274, “The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the mind-stuff has ‭itself spun these imaginings.” ‬

Eddington will also be found ‭below to emphasize values and the ‬
value of permanence in particular, in his arguments and in his
conception of the selectivity of mind. “The element of permanence
in the physical world,” he writes, “ … familiarly represented by the
conception of substance, is essentially a contribution of the mind to
the plan of building or selection.”

Arthur_S_Eddington_The_Nature_of_the_Physical_World_An_Annotated_Edition

Antonio Damasio – Self Comes to Mind

“We hypothesized that compassion for physical pain, being an evolutionarily older brain response, it’s clearly present in several nonhuman species – should be processed faster by the brain than compassion for the mental pain, something that requires the more complicated processing of a less immediately obvious predicament and that is likely to involve a wide compass of knowledge.”

“All the above strategies, I submit, began to evolve long before there was consciousness, just as soon as enough images were being made, perhaps as soon as real minds first bloomed. The vast unconscious probably has been part of the business of organizing life for a long, long time, and the curious thing is that it is still with us, as the great subterranean under our limited conscious existence.”

“The spiritual is a particular state of the organism, a delicate combination of certain body configurations and certain mental configurations. Sustaining such states depends on a wealth of thoughts about the condition of the self and the condition of other selves, about past and future, about both concrete and abstract conceptions of nature.” Looking for Spinoza

“Engaging in introspection turns out to be a translation, within the mind, of a process that complex brains have been engaged in for a long time in evolution: talking to themselves, both literally and in the language of neuron activity.”

“Needless to say, they do not really know what they are doing, let alone why. But they do what they do because of their exceedingly simple brains, without any mind to speak of and even less proper consciousness, use signals from the environment to engage one kin of behavior or the other.”

“Knowing as opposed to being and doing, was a critical break. The diference between life regulation before consciousness and after consciousness simply has to do with automation versus deliberation.”

“The ongoing of the digital revolution, the globalization of cultural information, and the coming of the age of empathy are pressures likely to lead to structural modifications of mind and self, by which I mean modifications of the very brain processes that shape the mind and self. Revolutionary arguments of the world.”

“How remarkably hybrid and flexible our mental lives are.”

Research on Experiences Related to the Possibility of Consciousness Beyond the Brain: A Bibliometric Analysis of Global Scientific Output – The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease


This study aims to conduct a search of publications investigating experiences commonly associated with the possibility of the existence of a consciousness independent of the brain held on the main scientific databases that are Pubmed, Web of Knowledge, PsycINFO, Science Direct, and Scopus.

Of the 9065 articles retrieved, 1954 were included (598 near-death experiences, 223 out-of-body experiences, 56 end-of-life experiences, 224 possession, 244 memories suggestive of past lives, 565 mediumship, 44 others). Over the decades, there was an evident increase in the number of articles on all the areas of the field, with the exception of studies on mediumship that showed a decline during the late 20th century and subsequent rise in the early 21st century. Regarding the types of articles found, with the exception of past-life memories and end-of-life experiences (mostly original studies), publications were predominantly review articles. The articles were published in journals with an impact factor similar to other areas of science.

Superior Colliculus, vision, mind, self

The superior colliculus is an important provider of visual maps and even has the ability to relate those visual maps to auditory and body-base maps. The inferior colliculus is dedicated to auditory processing. The activity of the superior colliculi may be a precursor of the mind and self processes that later blossom in the cerebral cortices.