What is the mind? I think to answer this question you must first establish that consciousness and mind are different. Human children are undoubtedly conscious at birth, but do not develop a mind until around age 4 as demonstrated by Sally-Anne psychological test. Animals are conscious, but lacking a neocortex their brains cannot establish complex enough hierarchies to develop a mind. With so much happening in the development of artificial intelligence, those developing it never set out to recreate the human brain specifically but nonetheless came to the same conclusions. We are beginning to get a clear picture of our brain as a computational organic machine. What is DNA if not sequences of data? Libraries of information that instruct cells to intelligently arrange according to their blueprints. The brain is like a computer with an operating system and storage, and our consciousness and personalities develop from the connections of our neurons based on experience as the pattern recognizers in our brains develop hierarchies. As our neural network reaches a certain level of complexity, mind arises as an emergent property of that complex system of connections. Now lets look at the internet. It is a network of information built up from millions of connections. The complexity of that system is growing exponentially via data mining. The more information we are able to gather and build into complex hierarchies the more intelligent our systems become. The compendium of all that information is building toward developing a conscious computer with a mind written in binary rather than DNA. In this scenario, we are like the receptors of information for the collective mind just as our neurons are in our brains. As above, so below. On the larger scale, we are supported by one star in a galaxy of 300 billion other stars. Perhaps the compendium of that complex system has a mind; and that galaxy is but one of 100 billion in our observable universe. And maybe our universe is but one atom in a much larger universe. And so it goes, infinitely. Each level of hierarchies having its own unique mind. That same infinitely repeating hierarchical structure applies the same for the infinitely small so that it could be said our bodies contain an infinite number of universes. On some level, all of our parts that build up the whole have mind... but ours is more complex on our perceivable level.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 07:02:10 +0000
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