Where is my mind?
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
He posits that mind vs. world dualism is mistaken because I can for example map addresses on my iPhone, thereby allowing me to store memories of different locations in my iPhone instead of my brain, therefore the iPhone is part of my "mind", therefore separating mind from external world is mistaken.
I think there is truth here, but I would go further - that just as in a LAN many terminals can access the same file, and therefore the separation between terminals is fuzzy, so too "mind" is a fuzzy concept much as "terminal" is a fuzzy concept in a LAN. Where does one terminal end and the next begin? Where does one "mind" begin and the next end?
Maybe instead of attacking mind vs. external world dualism we need to re-evaluate mind. To me it is perfectly valid to say the brain can "out source" certain tasks, like storing locations in an iPhone, and therefore the line between "outside world" and "inside world" gets blurred. But instead of saying my iPhone is part of my "mind", let's say the iPhone gets read and written to by the threads of my brain. Let's look at the iPhone not as "part of mind" but as an external hard drive written to and read from by the threads of my brain. At the end, there is no "mind" as an irreducible entity. There is only a multi-threaded neural network application in the wetware of a naked ape lately out of Africa.
The real dualism to attack is not "mind" vs. "outside world" but "brain" vs. "mind". There is no "mind" per ce in my opinion. What we call "mind" are the threads running in the brain, nothing more or less.