I don’t fully agree with this. There are plenty of systems in the body that have an impetus followed by a development of effects. For example, if an infection starts somewhere in your body there are white blood cells that first detect the infection. They release cytokines which cause both local and global effects throughout the body. You get a whole series of gene expression cascades that go up and down over time. Did the body evolve around the immune system? That question doesn’t make much sense to me because the immune system is as much a part of our body as anything else.
I don’t see a reason to conclude that an impetus has to come from anywhere else but the brain. I have yet to see a reason to treat the mind as anything other than what the brain does in the same way a fever is what the immune system does.
You’re right. There are plenty. The immune system is a great example in how the mind should function in a “mind=brain” scenario. The immune system responds when needed. We don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to know how it’s doing it. The body’s a stranger we get to know over time.
All the little interactions we have with our body, like hunger pangs, urges. The things that we feel that coax us into action. Pain that deters us from harm. Endorphins that reward and encourage us.
If the brain evolved first, and then created a mind, it seems it wouldn’t have to convince it’s own creation to then, in turn, tell the body to act.
“Decoding pictures” is not one and the same as determining what someone is thinking. When the brain processes a visual image, we can trace the activity that processes that image. When that image is recalled those same pathways are then reused to recall the image.
This is the physical brain processing physical information. This is not reading the mind.
And you never will. In a fully functioning brain there isn’t a single place that “light’s up” when the mind is active. Depending on what it’s doing to access the brain (recalling memories, operating a limb, etc) we can see this activity. This is not the “mind”.
There’s no way to observe a mind, so no way to see an active mind while the brain is out of commission. No way to determine if the mind is active or not.
Have you ever been anesthetized? It’s a rather strange experience. You shut your eyes one moment, and you wake up the very next moment with no sensation of the passage of time. During that time, your brain was shut down, and your mind disappears with it.
fMRI measures changes in blood flow. Blood flow changes in response to brain cell activity. The more active a brain cell is, the more oxygen it needs, and this is what triggers the changes in blood flow. We could discuss the specifics of neurobiology at the cellular level and how nerve impulses and synaptic activity requires ATP, if you want.
