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What is “the mind” and how does it work?

This has been a lifelong interest of mine. As I child I was always asking questions about why people thought and acted in different ways. As an adolescent I was consumed with an effort to understand my own self, which led back to my own mind… what do I know, how do I know it, what does it mean when what I know does not agree with what someone else knows…

At 19, I became so confused that I gave up. I didn’t know what to do and was tired of trying. I had grown up in a very religious family that believed in faith, not only as a virtue, but as the only thing that truly matters. My own opinion, based on my own experiences and observations of the world, was far different in that I valued “truth”. At that point in life, I really couldn’t explain what “truth” was for certain but I had a pretty good idea that it took more than just faith to find it.

The problem that I had with faith is that it just didn’t seem reasonable… in fact it seemed to be the exact opposite of reasonable in that being reasonable requires being validated by reason and reason demands evidence (I have reason to believe that you will hurt me because you are pointing a gun at me and saying that you will kill me).

Faith, in terms of what it meant to me and my family, was synonymous with the belief in the divine inspiration of the bible, from which all truth came. This was the foundation from which most people that I knew began from when thinking about the world and it led to conclusions that, while seeming reasonable to them, were only reasonable if one first accepted a proposition that seemed entirely unreasonable to me. I was often told that this was not really the case and many arguments were proposed to me in order to justify faith as a virtue. Even the bible verse so often quoted to me, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God”, seems to imply that faith is somehow reasonable and yet I couldn’t find any way to make sense of it. The idea that a special book that was written long ago that held all the answers screamed of mythology to me but I didn’t know how to prove it and what if I was wrong?

Fear of damnation and guilt at being a sinner seemed to me to be very poor reasons upon which to base my beliefs. Then I began to wonder more about the question of beliefs themselves. How do we know things, and is that different from a belief, or is that just a silly question… a play on words. I began exploring the literature in fields like psychology and philosophy, trying to learn enough to understand how the mind works. Well, talk about stumbling into a bottomless pit… the more I studied the more I realized that I did not understand. While I learned new things quickly I developed new questions at an astonishingly faster rate than I could find answers for them. What the hell was wrong with me, I often wondered.

 To be continued…