What Is the Mind?

What Is the Mind? Understanding mind and consciousness via the unified theory As I sit here pondering what to write, what is it, exactly, that is doing the pondering? Where do the thoughts come from? How does the three-pound mass of grey matter that is my brain give rise to the felt experience of sensations and thoughts? It sometimes seems essentially inconceivable that the water of material processes could give rise to the wine of consciousness. Indeed, it is so famous a conundrum that it has a name . . . the (in)famous mind-brain (or mind-body) problem. Failure to have consensual resolution to the mind-body (MB) problem remains at the heart of psychology and its difficulties as a fragmented discipline. My goal here is to briefly explain how the unified theory of psychology (UT) resolves the MB problem. We need to first get clear about what most folks mean when they use the term "mind." What, exactly, are they referring to? In common parlance, the mind most often refers to the seat of human consciousness, the thinking-feeling 'I' that seems to be an agentic causal force that is somehow related, but is also seemingly separable from the body. The idea of life after death is intuitively plausible to so many, because our mental life seems so different from our bodies that we could imagine our souls existing long after our bodies decompose. This leads to a common sense dualism that is part and parcel to many religious worldviews.