In 1988 the Pixies asked a question that philosophers and scientists still debate to this day. Since then and maybe a bit before, we’ve gotten a few different answers. In the analytic philosophy tradition we have two flavors of definition.

Dualistic approaches rely on a fundamental distinction between mind and matter. In turn, this class of definitions creates a mind-body problem. How could it possible that an immaterial mind could ever have an effect on a material substance like a body? Although, chocolate vanilla swirl is popular with more traditional thinkers and most religions, alternatives have been proposed. There tend to be three common choices:

• Idealism where everything is mental and matter is a hallucination.
• Neutral Monism which means neither mental nor material are the whole picture and there is something in between.
• Materialism where its matter all the way down.

For the working cognitive scientist materialism or a watered down neutral monism are sort of a job requirement. To be able to experimentally understand mind it needs to be material or very close to it. So how does a materialist (or watered down neutral monist) answer the question “Where is my mind?”

To Eliminate or Not

First though, what the hell is a mind? Usually mind is left undefined and can range from memory to consciousness. The most general definition we can give (in this context) is that it is a collection of mental faculties. There are many mental faculties, we can’t list them all but we can give some examples: emotions, thoughts, reasoning, memory, perception, planning, … Hopefully that gives a good idea of the kinds of stuff that make up minds. One problem though is these faculties were identified well before science had anything to say about minds. It turns out that these individual components are not as helpful as we would like. They are hard to identify and seem to have non-separable physical correlates. In simpler terms, they are too fuzzy to do science with. Although some scientists still hold on to [the modularity hypothesis] (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modularity-mind/) proposed by Fodor which claims that some of them are firm enough to build a science upon. However, this leaves us with a choice. Do we keep these terms and hope they are clear enough or do we start from scratch and reconsider what a mind is entirely? The second option I call the [elimination hypothesis] (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/). Eliminativists argue that we need to divide mind up in new ways and thus eliminate the existing faculties from the scientific vocabulary. This would have a whole bunch of implications, the central one being we as scientists now have the choice to pick what physical systems we consider to be the mind.

Neurocentrism (Mind-Brain Identity)

The simplest object we could pick is the brain. It’s an organ in our head that is always working and seems to be important for a lot of things. Its connected to every major system in our body and seems to correlate with intelligence across species. What if we call the brain our mind? The brain is as good a candidate as any. We found the digestive organ (stomach), the breathing organ (lungs), why not let the brain be the thinking organ. My mind is right here, in my head. Neurocentrism is one of the most dominant ways of thinking not only in academia but in most atheistic approaches to mind. Neurocentrism is also the work that underpins most of neuroscience as a whole. One limiting factor though is that pesky elimination hypothesis. If my mind is my brain then where are my thoughts? Neurons don’t look like thoughts, they also don’t act like them. So I can have this cool definition of mind that is material but I have to give up on explaining questions I might traditionally ask, like “what is love?”, “why am I happy?”, “how do I learn?”.

Embodiment

To motivate this approach lets consider the question “what is love?” A common story of love in the brain is that it is the chemical oxytocin. It is true that oxytocin correlates with what we would call love in many situations but it also correlates with a bunch of other stuff that definitely is not love. Since we’ve already accepted the elimination hypothesis though this is okay, we simply must accept that love isn’t a physical thing and oxytocin is. Love won’t be a scientific question. But what if I really really really want to ask about love, scientifically. Maybe just maybe love is oxytocin plus something else. We could consider how oxytocin interacts with blood pressure for example since love is also correlated with higher heart rates. Now we can start to see when oxytocin is and isn’t acting like love, it depends on whats going on in the rest of the body. This is what embodiment researchers advocate for. They argue that love is just one example but that mind itself can be better understood if we not only consider the brain but the whole body. In this case what makes up my mind is my entire body. There is no thinking organ thinking is what happens in all my organs as they interact together and keep me alive.

Situatedness

We now have two competing options for those willing to accept eliminativism. We can expand our definition of mind to encompass the body which allows us to more accurately capture some of the things we would traditionally associate with minds. Some take this even further. The argument goes that much of what we consider mind is not in one spatial location like a brain or body. Lets consider two of the fundamental functions of mind: action and perception. We could argue that action and perception are impossible without a world. The world has to be present for either of these two functions to be realized. Therefore the world is necessary for mind. Even if we put the brain in a vat we would still need to electrically stimulate it for it to do anything. This means that to have a description of mind we need it to be situated inside the world. Thus we introduce the situatedness of mind. This is the perspective that the world we live in with its physics and chemistry and culture and society is in a sense part of our mind. There both more moderate and more extreme versions of this position although it is probably one of the harder ones to commit to. However, it has lead to one of the most successful [research programmes] (http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-ecological-approach-explained-to-8.html) in all of psychology.

Concluding Remarks

Here I have presented some arguments for eliminativism as well as embodiment and situatedness. I don’t believe any one of these perspectives is exactly right, although personally, I think situated and embodied cognition is the most interesting. One conclusion worth drawing is that science is about creating new ideas just as much as it is about discovery something that exists. There is no pure discovery. Every scientific idea is built on a world of assumptions. Making those explicit allows us to try new ones and maybe find something better. The universe is messy and doesn’t fit well into our little boxes. That doesn’t mean we give up on boxes but it does mean we need to be okay with changing them and moving stuff around once in a while.