7. Mind: A General View

Mind has always been more than just any abstract question and has evoked enormous interest in intellectuals. The notion of mind is wide spread in various kinds of intellectual permits. In Western religious philosophy, the nature of mind is connected with various conceptions of the soul and the possibility of life after death. This means the soul and the mind is identical. In many abstract theories of mind there is considerable overlap between philosophy and the science of psychology. Actually from the time of Socrates and Plato till the last quarter of the nineteenth century psychology was part of philosophy. In 1879, psychology was split off and formed as an independent experimental science by Wilhelm M Wundt (1832-1920). While philosophy uses reasoned arguments and thought experiments in seeking to understand the concepts that underlie mental phenomena, psychology uses scientific experiments to study mental states and events. Also influenced by philosophy of mind is the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a branch of computer science, which endeavors to develop computers that can mimic what the human mind can do. Cognitive science then attempts to integrate the understanding of mind provided by philosophy, psychology, AI, as well as other disciplines. And finally, all of these fields benefit from the detailed understanding of the brain that has emerged through neuroscience in the late twentieth century. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) proposed that only two substances ultimately exist that is mind and body. He then established the dualism of body and mind, the former being material and the latter immaterial. This Cartesian dichotomy has had influence on thinking until the twentieth century when Descartes’ dualism was rejected.

The classical picture of body versus mind or soul tended to be distorted with the appearance of British empiricism. There arose many positions which were different like ‘matter generates mind’, ‘mind generates matter’, and that ‘human minds are finite whereas God’s mind is infinite’ and so on and so forth. Even some psychologists such as J. B Watson (1878-1958), the father of Behaviourism, denied the existence of mind. He rejected the idea of mind or consciousness to be the subject-matter of psychology. In general, the problem of dualism -mind or soul versus matter or body -was dissolved by both the idealistic and the materialistic philosophers. Idealism posited mind and negated matter. In contrast, materialism posited matter and negated mind. The materialist considered consciousness as an epiphenomenon of highly organized and evolved matter. In their outlook, there is neither God nor soul. And that mind is simply the brain; that is, the brain and the mind are identical. And hence, all processes are physical and none is mental. This view in part is subscribed by most cognitive scientists. It means scientists, on the one hand, do not consider the mind to be different from the brain, but they also on the other do not subscribe to the view of the identity of the brain and the mind. They adduce strong evidences for mind affecting brain and that mind, as associated with consciousness, has some control over brain. In other words, brain is said to serve as the instrument of the mind. The brain is structural and the mind is functional.

The term ‘mind’ is really significant. To define this term is not easy but at the same time not entirely impossible. The fact is that mind considers all mental phenomena that are features of human beings such as sensation, perception, thought, belief, desire, intention, memory, emotion, imagination, and purposeful action. Some of these functions are also found in other animals. These phenomena can be broadly grouped as thoughts and experiences. Thus mind can be defined as that which thinks and experiences.

The contemporary philosophy of neurosciences has three views of mind: (i) empirically, mind is regarded to be determined by neuronal states characterizing brain; (ii) epistemically, mind is determined by mental states accessible in the first-person perspective; and (iii) ontologically, mind is determined either by mental properties or physical properties.

The Cambridge Advance Learner’s Dictionary (2003) defines the term ‘mind’ as “the part of a person that enables a person to think, feel emotions and be aware of things.” In the sense of psychology, mind is viewed as “a generalized characteristic of personal cognitive possibilities, in opposition to sentiments and will. In a narrower sense, mind is the individual psychological characteristic of human intellectual abilities” (Petrovsky & Yaroshevsky 1985: 190). In general, the definition of mind is a lot more and different but generally these all views describe mind on the basis of functionnal attributes: the mental activities and memory of a person including both conscious thoughts and unconscious activity.

There are two terms occurring in Pāli Buddhist Canon, ‘citta’ and ‘manas’ which are both translated into English as ‘mind’. It is because that in Early Buddhism, citta, manas (intellect), and even viññāna (consciousness) are regarded as virtually synonymous and used interchangeable. However, in the later Buddhist schools mind is distinguished from these two terms. Manas is said to “represent the rational faculty of man,”^[1] viññāna with a more connotation “represents the field of sense and sense-reaction that is the sphere of sensory and perceptive activity,”^[2] whereas citta is defined as the cognitive ground underlying the dynamic system of psychological operations (Keown 2003: 62). As presented by T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede in their Pali-English Dictionary (2003: 266), citta means ‘heart’ psychologically as the centre and focus of man’s emotional nature as well as that intellectual element which inheres in and accompanies its manifestations; that is, thought. In this wise citta denotes both the agent and that which is enacted, for in Indian psychology citta is the seat and organ of thought (cetasā cinteri). According to their suggestion, when citta is in singular form it should be turn into as ‘heart’ and when in plural as ‘thought’. Thus, although all three citta, manas and viññāna constitute the invisible energizer of the body while manas and viññāna stress on the mental and rational side, citta lays emphasis on the emotional and conative side or ‘thought’.

The concept of mind as regarded this study is broadly used depended on the background of philosophy of language in examining and analyzing the suttas in the Five Nikāyas.

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

J. Dhirasekera, the Encyclopaedia of Buddhism, IV, pp. 169.

[2]:

See Vol. 3, trans. by FW, pp. 87.