What is mentality?

[Plu]

I think there may be some interesting implications for what our experience of ourselves in the world means to us if we realize that our experience of the world and ourselves in the world is a model created from information from our senses about ourselves and the world.

That's how I've always looked at it. It's good for your understanding that everyone sees the world differently, quite literally. We're just processing small parts of reality and building our own models that filter out what we consider important. It's why, if multiple people look at the same scene, a few seconds later each of them remembers completely things about it.

[entropy]

Quite simply "mentality" is a mind set. Consciousness is just awareness.
"Mentality" is a development, consciousness is a natural state.

Okay. About the nature of consciousness/awareness:  Is it a physical substance? Is it a non-physical thing? If it is a non-physical thing, then why does it appear to interact so closely with physical substances? If it isn't a physical substance and it isn't a non-physical substance, then what is it? How would you answer those questions?

[entropy]

I think there may be some interesting implications for what our experience of ourselves in the world means to us if we realize that our experience of the world and ourselves in the world is a model created from information from our senses about ourselves and the world.

That's how I've always looked at it. It's good for your understanding that everyone sees the world differently, quite literally. We're just processing small parts of reality and building our own models that filter out what we consider important. It's why, if multiple people look at the same scene, a few seconds later each of them remembers completely things about it.

I was trying to get at something a bit different from that, but I do agree with what you are saying. Sometimes when I'm out on a walk with my dog I'll let my mind slip into imagining what the experience of the world is like from the perspective of the people I see along the way. Quite often I'll start imagining from there what it would be like to have the perspective of individual animals like particular squirrels and birds I see along the way. I wonder if my brain could process the models birds make in their brains.

[mykcob4]

Quite simply "mentality" is a mind set. Consciousness is just awareness.
"Mentality" is a development, consciousness is a natural state.

Okay. About the nature of consciousness/awareness:  Is it a physical substance? Is it a non-physical thing? If it is a non-physical thing, then why does it appear to interact so closely with physical substances? If it isn't a physical substance and it isn't a non-physical substance, then what is it? How would you answer those questions?

Ah theres the rub. If we had the answer to that we could factually dispell gods altogether.
At what point is something conscious and alive and how can it be defined? Then the further question of what is genetically carried in the brain that becomes instint and what is learned? Are there chemical cues that determine all things? What experiences trigger chemical reactions that cause certain behaviors? That seems to be your question expanded, and I don't have the answer. You need to disect your question down and find the answer to each segment. Your question is too broad and therefore not even debatable, they are infact rhetorical in nature.
I love the subject that incompasses anthropology, philosophy, chemistry, genetics, history, phycology and many other disciplines, but it's far too broad.

[entropy]

Quite simply "mentality" is a mind set. Consciousness is just awareness.
"Mentality" is a development, consciousness is a natural state.

Okay. About the nature of consciousness/awareness:  Is it a physical substance? Is it a non-physical thing? If it is a non-physical thing, then why does it appear to interact so closely with physical substances? If it isn't a physical substance and it isn't a non-physical substance, then what is it? How would you answer those questions?

Ah theres the rub. If we had the answer to that we could factually dispell gods altogether.
At what point is something conscious and alive and how can it be defined? Then the further question of what is genetically carried in the brain that becomes instint and what is learned? Are there chemical cues that determine all things? What experiences trigger chemical reactions that cause certain behaviors? That seems to be your question expanded, and I don't have the answer. You need to disect your question down and find the answer to each segment. Your question is too broad and therefore not even debatable, they are infact rhetorical in nature.
I love the subject that incompasses anthropology, philosophy, chemistry, genetics, history, phycology and many other disciplines, but it's far too broad.

To have a complete answer to the whole nature of mentality what you say is true. But I think it's like if a geologist found a previously unidentified kind of mineral. He may not have yet reduced the mineral to its components and seen how the fit together, but that doesn't mean that he can't be very confident in saying that the mineral is matter. Why can't we do the same thing with mentality?

We do have the actual, functioning example of our own mentalities so we for sure have the experience of mentality even if we never tried to measure or reduce it to its components. We know that our own mentality exists. We say that things exist in certain ways. Materialists say that everything that exists, physically exists and that mentality is material just like everything else. Mind-body dualists would say the world has both physical qualities and mental qualities that are distinct from the physical qualities and that mind exists separately from physical things.

Basically, I guess what I'm asking is - in your view of the fundamental ways things exist in the world, in what way do you think your mentality exists? Matter? Energy? Both? Something else?

[entropy]

I think there may be some interesting implications for what our experience of ourselves in the world means to us if we realize that our experience of the world and ourselves in the world is a model created from information from our senses about ourselves and the world.

That's how I've always looked at it. It's good for your understanding that everyone sees the world differently, quite literally. We're just processing small parts of reality and building our own models that filter out what we consider important. It's why, if multiple people look at the same scene, a few seconds later each of them remembers completely things about it.

I just realized that I badly overstated things in the bolded part above. The way I stated it, it implies that our experience is wholly made up of models of the world. I don't think that is the case. When I feel pain, I am experiencing pain, not experiencing some "pain" model of the world. Sensory impressions, emotions and basic mental orientation are important aspects of what makes up my experience that are not models of the world.

[mykcob4]

There have been numerous experiments very credible that have explored the physical weight of a single thought. Unfortunately we cannot isolate a single thought to actually weigh it. Even a spark has weight. Light has weight. So you quest has been taken up by the most credible and experienced people throughout history and at present and have yet to be able to isolate a single thought!

[entropy]

There have been numerous experiments very credible that have explored the physical weight of a single thought. Unfortunately we cannot isolate a single thought to actually weigh it. Even a spark has weight. Light has weight. So you quest has been taken up by the most credible and experienced people throughout history and at present and have yet to be able to isolate a single thought!

There's a lot of value in explaining things by reducing them to their physical components and I am asking what mentality is in a fundamental way, but I'm beginning to think that though mentality is a manifestation of physical phenomena, it is not fundamentally about physical components as individual measurable bits but instead about patterns of activity of those physical components.

Take a functioning brain which through the person's behavioral responses we assume has mentality just like our own happening "in it". Say the person is in the middle of explaining why Keynesian economics is wrong and then due to the most improbable of quantum improbabilities, the organic order of the atoms of his brain become scrambled into a goopy mess. Same atoms, same energy as a moment before it happened. I think it is safe to assume that his brain went from having mentality "in it" to not. What's the difference? It seems to me that it is that the patterns of activity amongst the neurons of his brain were no longer possible because the physical structure that was necessary for the patterns of activity no longer existed. So doesn't that imply something important about the fundamental nature of mentality - that mentality is a particular pattern of physical activity. Mentality is not a thing composed of matter, though it is produced by activity of matter. I think mentality is particular patterns of energy exchanges that we know at least take place within the complex matter matrix of the normally functioning human brain.

So that's how I would answer my own question, "What is mentality?" I think mentality is particular patterns of energy exchanges that we know take place in a normally functioning human brain. If that is right, then mentality is literally rhythms of energy within our heads. I like to think of it figuratively as energy dancing around in my head - dancing to the beat of my body and how it takes in and responds to that which is beyond my body. That is what I think mentality is in a physical sense. Then there is what mentality is in the sense of experiencing mentality - that nexus of sensory feelings and programmed goals and memories and models of our bodies and models of the world beyond our bodies and models of how models of our bodies fit in the models of the world. The experience of that nexus changing from moment to moment as the conditions of our bodies and the rest of the world change. The experience of being able to reach out with our bodies into the world and create changes in the world. The experience of being able to reach out to other mentalities through my fingers - manipulating a complex web of technology to communicate with them.

[Solitary]

Why is it assumed there is dualism?

I do not and did not assume there is dualism and if I understand drunkenshoe correctly, he definitely doesn't assume dualism either. Who is assuming dualism?

I will say that given that this is an atheism forum, that when I crafted the first post in this thread, I assumed that pretty much everyone would not believe in dualism (not that you have to be a theist to believe in dualism - just that atheists tend not to be dualists).

I didn't mean it for you, but those that believe it. Many philosophers believed in dualism. Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was arguing with the fact that there are people that believe in it, and not with you or drunkenshoe. Solitary

[Solitary]

entropy, I just read this in your intro thread. You wrote it as an answer to solitary.

I prefer to use the term "physicalist" rather than "materialist", but they are usually taken to mean the same thing. I am pretty much a physicalist.

Why did you ask about it?

Well, it turns out that I needed an updating on my conception of materialism/physicalism, too. The matter-energy version of materialism I was presenting is too simplistic. I had not really appreciated how nuanced the responses to these kinds of questions can be. Here's an interesting article I found:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... alism.html


The thing I can't get over, though, is the notion that if you believe that there is no more to reality than matter and energy, then isn't mental activity matter and/or energy? It's like a Venn diagram - there is a big circle that is labeled "reality". Not touching or overlapping the "reality" circle is another circle or circles of things that are "not matter" and "not energy". The "matter" and "energy" circles are wholly within the "reality" circle. Now where do we put the "mentality" circle? I think it's a given that mentality is real so we know we are going to put it in the "real" circle. Does it go within the "matter" circle or the "energy" circle or overlap both. Is there a region or regions of the "reality" circle that is/are not within the domains of the "matter" circle or the "energy" circle? If so what is the nature of those regions? What is it that is real but is not matter and not energy? Where does the mentality circle go?

This is a common misconception that energy is not matter or physical. What is not matter or energy? Time. Mentality emerges from the action of particles of energy in time in the brain-body and is real like a thought or imaginary idea in the mind or mental realm, but not in the materialistic or physical. Just my opinion, or not. I'm not so sure asking this question is not like asking why one and one is two, or a rhetorical question. Mentality is a mental activity with physical causes and is subjectively real but not objectively real.

This physical activity can be measured with certain kinds of MRIs.  Our minds are like the trickster gods of mythology and create illusions from information from our senses. Our minds even create the reality we experience, but the information is shared by all conscious creatures. We only think everything is the way it appears. When people are schizophrenic they can't tell what is real or just in their thoughts as delusions. And we all have our own delusions.  :shock:  Solitary

[Solitary]

I ask what mentality is rather than what consciousness is or what awareness is because I think those are "fuzzier" concepts to deal with. I think someone who we say is unconscious has mental activity - it just isn't mental activity of the conscious kind. (The term, "aware", seems to be used pretty much as a synonym for "conscious".) I think a person who is having a severe epileptic seizure has mentality.

So what do I mean by the word "mentality"? I mean that activity that empirical evidence seems to pretty conclusively show happens as a result of neural activity in the brain. I think EEG's (and similar technologies) can detect at least some of the neural activity that is associated with mentality - the kind of thing that is missing from someone who has suffered extreme brain damage and we say is brain "dead".

In the most intimate sense, though, mentality for most of us is thought of mostly in terms of the phenomenon of personal experience of being. It is the locus of "me". It seems to "flow" from moment to moment in mostly predictable ways when we experience mentality in its conscious/aware form. In its conscious/aware form, mentality seems to have a perspective with respect to a reality beyond direct information of senses (which are part of conscious/aware mentality). That makes up much of the experiential aspect of mentality.

I don't think, though, that mentality has to be coherent like the experience of listening to music that evokes strong feelings. When someone is unfortunate enough to have an epileptic seizure I think there is mentality without much coherence - though hopefully neural pathways can readily reestablish coherence.  

So, to the question - what is mentality? In some very important respects, I haven't actually said what I think mentality is. Is it a physical substance? Is it a non-physical thing? If it is a non-physical thing, then why does it appear to interact so closely with physical substances? If it isn't a physical substance and it isn't a non-physical substance, then what is it? How would you answer those questions?

The best question asked at this forum in my opinion. It covers psychology, physics, philosophy, and even religious belief. A fascinating question to ask that might not have an answer because of self referential and lead to paradoxes.   8-)  Solitary

[entropy]

This is a common misconception that energy is not matter or physical.

I didn't intend to imply that energy is not physical. I sort have been positing that what is physical is either matter or energy or both, but, of course, e=mc[sup:3tviy3hs]2[/sup:3tviy3hs], shows that the distinction between energy and matter is contingent and in an ultimate sense, they are the same. I tend to think of matter as super-condensed energy (my apologies if any physicists that might find that characterization objectionable). So when I described the Venn diagram, I think I could have essentially just had an "energy" circle, rather than an "energy" circle AND a "matter" circle.

[entropy]

So, to the question - what is mentality? In some very important respects, I haven't actually said what I think mentality is. Is it a physical substance? Is it a non-physical thing? If it is a non-physical thing, then why does it appear to interact so closely with physical substances? If it isn't a physical substance and it isn't a non-physical substance, then what is it? How would you answer those questions?

The best question asked at this forum in my opinion. It covers psychology, physics, philosophy, and even religious belief. A fascinating question to ask that might not have an answer because of self referential and lead to paradoxes.   8-)  Solitary

It would be interesting to hear of any problems of self referentiality or paradoxes. I think one of the interesting aspects to this has to do with assuming I am right that what we know of as mentality is essentially a particular pattern of energy exchanges in our brains. Most of us come to believe that because we use the example of mentality that we know - our own mentality - and infer that other people that look and behave like us also have mentality. If that inference is correct, then it certainly appears that mentality as we know it is dependent on the physical structures of the human brain.

Here's an interesting part - are there other physical structures that produce phenomena that are much like the mentality that we know through the experience of our own mentality? Of course, there is the issue of organisms that have brain structures similar to ours - do they also experience mentality? It sure seems like chimps and apes do and I'd bet that dogs and cats experience some mentality, too. Maybe any organism with a functioning nervous system has enough physical complexity to produce the right kind of energy exchange patterns to have there be a least some mentality. Like a continuum - flatworms not much mentality, a lobster maybe a bit more and dolphins quite a bit.

There is also the classic question of whether or not computers could be structured in a way that the have patterns of energy exchange that are pretty much what we think of as mentality. I suspect so. To what degree does the existence of mentality depend on the structure and function of nervous systems with brains? What kinds of organized structures that produce patterns of energy exchange may also be producing something akin to what we know as mentality?