The Brain and Partitioning

Holy shit, this is goddamn important! No, seriously. This is significant.

Descartes, right? Dualism. Separation of the mind and body. Kind of wrong, but important in that it illustrates the divide between the physical aspect of the brain and the mental aspect. The mental part - your mind - is a product of the brain. Yes, I'm a physicalist, and I am totally okay with that, because it makes goddamn sense and doesn't turn the mind into some metaphysical psychobabble bullshit.

But what you need to remember is that the mind is a product of the brain, right? Analogy, f(x) = y, f is the physical part of the brain, x is its functionality, y is the mind. Makes sense, yes? Ish. Okay that analogy kind of fails, but I'm typing at the speed of thought here, so bear with me.

The goddamn brain is partitioned! Okay, like prefrontal cortex and all that neurobiological bullshit. The pieces aren't relevant, what's relevant is the fact that it's in pieces. "The sum is greater than the whole of the parts," some might say, and yes, I totally concur.

However, that phrase is usually used to indicate that the mind is greater than the sum of the brain parts. That somehow from all these disparate pieces a mind comes together, fully cogent, and what-not.

I CALL SHENANIGANS!

Layers, people! Ogres have layers, cakes have layers, onions have layers, and holy shit, your goddamn mind has layers, too! The fucking subconscious, it's a thing we talk about all the goddamn time, yet philosophers of mind seem to totally ignore it or treat it irresponsibility.

Okay, so we ...

...

What's the point in being excited about something that might wind up being bullshit upon further review.

Basically: theory. Between the layer that is the actual mind and the actual brain, there is a system of relatively-independent layers which are actuated by the various pieces of the brain. Instead of saying that the mind is a product of the brain, we have these "mind pieces" that are products of the "brain pieces," which - when combined - produce the mind itself.

This is a sensible conclusion, due to an individual's ability to "overwrite" reactions to input over time. For instance, pheromones: an individual can, over time, condition themselves to react differently to their presence.

If there was a direct mind-brain connection, this kind of overwrite wouldn't be possible, because of the systemic nature of the mind. It relies on the entirety of the brain, so overwriting one piece would be difficult at best, if not impossible. But if you break the mind into pieces at a lower level, one area can overwrite portions of another, without having an immediate impact on the mind at the higher level. Gradual, yes, but the kind of disruption that would come from a brain-to-mind-to-brain overwrite just isn't evident in the majority of cases, I think.

Such overwriting, if done at the higher level, would completely screw over the mind because of the nature of the mind itself - a product of the physical system at a lower level. The mind is a product of the brain-state taken as a whole, not as pieces. But if you insert another layer and say that the mind is a product of the mind-pieces-state, which is itself a product of the various pieces of the brain, you remove the issue. The changes are phased over the course of the process, rather than completely disruptive.

I'm starting to use rationalization, here, which is not so good.

But this model explains a lot of things, like the classic "internal struggle" - we can much more easily demonstrate such a thing if we introduce a sub-cognitive layer between the consciousness and the brain, where such conflicts take place. It doesn't make sense that these things would happen at the brain level: that's the hardware, it just does what it does. But to say that those conflicts and such occur at the cognition level seems inadequate: there is something more going on there, some conflict occurring that causes the mind to sometimes be unable to resolve itself. That would seem to indicate something going on at a lower level than is immediately accessible, but - again - the brain is just hardware.

That's all I've got, right now.