Mind

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February 27th, 2021
Today it struck me that I think there's a tendency to basically associate Pattern with Mind and Nebulosity with Nature, like in the notion that the physical universe itself is essentially just a nebulous flux, and pattern is this mental overlay of conceptual projection.
📰 The Big Lebowski - Wikiquote
This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder's head. Luckily I'm adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug regimen to keep my Mind, you know, limber.
📙 Being-In-The-World
Heidegger does not want to make practical activity primary; he wants to show (pace Husserl) that neither practical activity nor contemplative knowing can be understood as a relation between a self-sufficient Mind and an independent world.
The above description of the skilled use of Equipment enables Heidegger to introduce both a new kind of Intentionality (absorbed coping) which is not that of a Mind with content directed toward objects, and a new sort of entity encountered (transparent Equipment) which is not a determinate, isolable substance.
📙 Dependent Rational Animals
Consider how both physical and mental disability are afflictions of the body and how therefore habits of Mind that express an attitude of denial towards the facts of disability and dependence presuppose either a failure or a refusal to acknowledge adequately the bodily dimensions of our existence. This failure or refusal is perhaps rooted in, is certainly reinforced by the extent to which we conceive of ourselves and imagine ourselves as other than animal, as exempt from the hazardous condition of “mere” animality.
📙 Hyperobjects
Yet always with those beautiful chords, the ones that lash you to the mast. The walls of feedback that the Velvet Underground inaugurated in “Heroin” are sound as hyperobject, a sound from which I can’t escape, a viscous sonic latex. It hurts me. A strange masochistic dimension of aesthetic experience opens up underneath the one in which the “art object” and I appear to be held in a perfect Kantian Mind meld.
Intelligence need not be thought of as having a picture of reality in the Mind, but as an interaction between all kinds of entities that is somewhat “in the eye of the beholder”—including, of course, myself, who feels quite clever stumbling over the glacier, until my reflection causes me to topple sideways into the freezing water.
Thinking is already, in itself, a relation to the nonhuman, insofar as the logical content of one’s thought is independent of the Mind thinking it.
📙 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
we have no idea of what a Mind is save that it is made of whatever universals are made of.
Recent philosophy of Mind has tended to lump this vague conglomerate—man’s Glassy Essence—together with the post-Cartesian notions of “consciousness” or “awareness.”
📙 Prayer
I plead with God, as if hoping to change God’s Mind and overcome divine reluctance. Instead, I should start upstream where the flow begins.
📙 Scattered Minds
The adult with attention deficit disorder needs to know that the physical space she occupies can help to either harmonize or disorganize her Mind.
The hallmark of ADD is an automatic, unwilled “tuning-out,” a frustrating nonpresence of Mind.
Completely lacking in the ADD Mind is a template for order, a mental model of how order comes about.
The individual with ADD experiences the Mind as a perpetual-motion Machine. An intense aversion to boredom, an abhorrence of it, takes hold as soon as there is no ready focus of activity, distraction or attention.
📙 The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics
I propose that the key to a new appreciation of Aquinas’s work is to be found in a set of dispositions that he appends to the Virtues, namely the ‘gifts.’ Although the presence of the gifts in his accounts is no mystery, I use new research to re-interpret their pivotal role. In particular, I argue that Aquinas’s descriptions of the operation of these gifts have remarkable similarities to contemporary work in social cognition, especially the phenomenon of the joint attention of two persons, which has been described as a ‘meeting of Minds’ and ‘sharing an awareness of the sharing of focus.’
Virtue is a good quality of the Mind, by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us, without us.
📙 The Spell of the Sensuous
To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our Minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or “Mind,” not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds.
For the Navajo, then, the Air—particularly in its capacity to provide awareness, thought, and speech—has properties that European, alphabetic civilization has traditionally ascribed to an Interior, individual human “Mind” or “psyche.” Yet by attributing these powers to the Air, and by insisting that the “Winds within us” are thoroughly continuous with the Wind at large—with the invisible medium in which we are immersed—the Navajo elders suggest that that which we call the “Mind” is not ours, is not a human possession. Rather, Mind as Wind is a property of the encompassing world, in which humans—like all other beings—participate.
Within alphabetic civilization, virtually every human psyche construes itself as just such an individual “Interior,” a private “Mind” or “consciousness” unrelated to the other “Minds” that surround it, or to the environing earth. For there is no longer any common medium, no reciprocity, no respiration between the inside and the outside.
The human Mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth.
Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses—once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth—become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract Mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary.