This is just as bunk as people who continually cite the word 'consciousness' to evoke god without saying 'god', and in all cases I've heard its always trying to use the available scientific evidence and pervert its meaning to suit mysticism & superstition of non-scientific minded people.

Oh dualism, you so cute.

My big problem with mind is how does mind exist when elements of mind happen simultaneously and the seemingly corresponding elements of brain happen asynchronously, and never join in the entire brain. Or in other words, Mind seems to be a complete stream of all the senses at the same time, but never in Brain is there a spot where all elements of brain meet to cause a simultaneous mind. Or to say it in another way, mind seems to defy space. Causal interactions, not counting for QED, happen adjacently. How does mind exist the way it does if all brain interactions that seem to make up mind are not adjacent? Mind has to be able to be traced down to one spot in brain, or mind is a very odd thing, indeed.

@GeeSussFreeK

"never in Brain is there a spot where all elements of brain meet to cause a simultaneous mind."

Neural activation occurs within different parts of the brain, and all the different parts are connected. There doesn't need to be an identifiable 'mind circuit' because the entire brain is the 'mind circuit.'

@chilaxe

I have heard similar explanations and they still don't make sense to me. Mostly because it doesn't jive with how we experience reality. It is like saying 2 different radio stations broadcasting 2 different signals at 2 different frequencies are one radio station. Or, to put in back in the Brain; the Eye and Smell system never "touch" in your brain, but still form a mind where they are touching. What, where, why and how are the 2 signals being interpolated as one? The thing that is doing that is what we call mind...what, where, why, and how still haven't had a convincing explanation...to me at least.

It doesn't jive with how you experience reality? Well sorry, but, too bad -- that's precisely what it is. Your phenomenological experience feeling different to your epistemological experience is irrelevant. At some point you have to stop the infinite regress of intervening variables and just accept that brain=mind, and that ironically, your mind has not evolved to comprehend the vastness of a system like the brain. All the evidence we have suggests brain=mind. You can invoke dualism but it's akin to supernaturalism -- there's no need. Furthermore, the idea that the eye and smell system never "touch" is wrong. Finally, why focus on cross-modal sensory integration when there are more interesting questions that relate to the brain and mind? e.g., qualia, peak shift, synchrony.

Sorry don't mean that to sound rude, just my 2c.

I just posted a relevant video on computational neuroscience, which might answer some questions.

It's a bit hard to argue with "we think it works this way" when you have a machine that also works "this way".

How a Theory of the Neocortex May Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines

I read this the other day, not exactly on point -- science likes reproduciable experiments, and we have many discoveries yet to make:

All of this brings to mind a surprising turn I encountered near the end of Nick Lane's wonderful book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. The turn is not a hard turn made by a man with a background in the hard sciences (Lane is a biochemist), but a soft turn to the dreamy speculations of panpsychism. The turn was made to hint at the place one might possibly find an explanation for the nature of emotions and states of mind:

"Feelings are physical, yet the known laws of physics, which can supposedly give us a complete account of the world, have no place for them. For all its marvellous power, natural selection doesn't conjure up something from nothing: there has to be a germ of something for it to act upon, a germ of a feeling, you might say, that evolution can fashion into the majesty of mind. This is what Scottish physical chemist Graham Cairns-Smith calls `the bomb in the basement' of modern physics. Presumably, he says, if feelings don't correspond to any of the known properties of matter, then matter itself must have some additional features, `subjective features', that when organised by selection ultimately give rise to our inner feelings. Matter is conscious in some way, with `inner' properties, as well as the familiar external properties that physicists measure. Pan-psychism is taken seriously again."

When it was last taken seriously, at the end of the 19th century, the psychologist/philosopher William James called conscious matter some kind of "mind-dust."

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/06/19/bees-can-be-pessimistic-about-life

"Natural selections doesn't conjure up something from nothing : there has to be a germ of something for it to act upon" - funny that he used the word "germ". Bacteria can move towards food, and that has simple chemical explanations. Critters with more complex means of moving towards food have brains or at least a nervous system.

Is there some point where it makes sense to say that a critter "feels hungry"? Yes, when it has a brain.

The idea of "you cant have X without Y" might be right in a way, but all you have to do to come up with "oooh, spooky! There's an X without Y!!" is to not look too hard and to avoid seeing Y when it's not convenient for "spooky".