On 10.09.05 00:00, Susan Pritchard wrote:
>
> The brain is the machinery working in tandem with the body and the mind is the
> functioning of the brain and body, most importantly, the emotions which have
> an immense effect on our thought processes. One reason why artificial
> intelligence has run into a wall is that creating a computer that can feel..as
> well as cogitate has so far proved impossible.
An interesting if implicitly unreconstructed dualistic notion of self and
how it might be formed in relation to the mind and the body.
I would agree that the brain is that part of the body where the mind is most
easily found to be located. However, I would argue that any attempt to
define the mind primarily in respect of its relation to the body, or even to
the individual, will function to deter the development of more interesting
lines of inquiry into the formation of the self as a social being.
That is to say, in short, the mind might more usefully be thought of as a
network of elements, some of which are constrained within the physical
limits of self (DNA, the body and our perceptions) but many of which are
extraneous to those limits. Here the mind can be seen to be a function and
part of its social context and determiners. It can be argued that the self
is, in a most profound sense, a form of linguistic instantiation; where the
individual exists as an instance amongst the linguistically (and thus
socially) defined range of possible selves.
In this view both the mind and the self are regarded as entities where their
congruency with what is commonly regarded as the self (the body and its
associated personality and behaviour) is only partial. If you like you can
see this idea taking the notion of the collective unconscious and distancing
it from the pseudo-scientific mysticism it is often associated with and
firmly situating it instead within a post-Freudian and post-Foucauldian
analysis of the self as a socially defined entity, thus allowing the full
weight of ethnographic analysis to be brought to bear on the emergent area
of what is coming to be known as "consciousness studies".
In the process problematic dualisms are avoided.
Best
Simon
Simon Biggs
[log in to unmask]
http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
Professor, Art and Design Research Centre
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/cri/adrc/research2/
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