Where Do Mind and Matter Come From? – Dialectic Two Step

Estimated reading time: 9 minute(s)

Question: What Is The Ground From Which Mind and Matter Come?

Response: This is a pretty rich and potentially confusing question. The question and the answer requires knowledge of the particularly Buddhist concepts being bantered around. Words like ground and mind have distinct meanings in Buddhism and they are in a certain context.

I think we should strip away a lot of the fancy dressing and talk about this in simpler terms. To that end I’ll rephrase the question:

Where do mind and matter come from?

I’ll also place a constraint around my answer. I’ll pass on the dualism.

Despite constraining myself to avoid dualism, I will approach this from two different perspectives. First there is the individual’s experience and second is the scientific and historical record.

From an individual’s perspective everything we experience happens behind the windows of perception. We can make inferences about the so-called “real world”, some better than others. But all of this is happening in mind. To be concrete about this, it all happens between the nerves, the brain, and something called consciousness.

Everything we experience happens behind the windows of perception
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I want to pause here and stress a point about the insights that meditation can and can’t offer.  Meditation can give you a mature understanding of the nature of our thoughts and our reactions to them. This all happens in consciousness and these insights are life changing. But, meditation cannot give you any insight into the inner workings of the brain.

Meditation cannot give you any insight into the inner workings of the brain.
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Introspection cannot observe the mechanical brain, the nervous system, or its complex neurochemical machinery. Everything we’ve learned about these processes has been through medical research and artificial intelligence. There are also pretty good models of how consciousness works as a function of these physical mechanisms.

So when we wax philosophical about the ground of mind and matter, we are speaking at the level of the individual and our perceptions.  What constitutes mind and matter to our conscious selves is a very abstract thing and it guides to our thinking relationship to the world.  These observations have real and important effects on how we go about carrying out our relationships, worship, and so on.

Science – the method of forming hypothesis, making observations that confirm or reject them, and then adjusting – offers another perspective. The fields of neurology, cognitive sciences, and artificial intelligence have converged to offer some pretty reliable models about how the brain works to oversee the body and provide neat features like memory and consciousness.

These materialist models offer a compelling link between matter and mind, without relying on dualistic speculation.  These models are also pretty consistent and predictive.  So much so that in the mere 60 years since Alan Turing created his code breaking device – in many ways the first computer – we are witness to bots on Twitter and robots that can learn, think, and act like humans.

in the mere 60 years since Alan Turing created his computer ...robots can learn, think, and act like…
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To answer the question in two parts, science tells us that mind comes out of matter. The story of matter is an historical one leading back to the big bang, by way of planets, stars, and a singularity.

Dialectic Two-Step  is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

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