The metaphoric brain: mind and consciousness

Abstract

How mind and consciousness emerge from brain processes remains one of the major scientific challenges of the twenty-first century. This problem also serves as an intersection point between the sciences and humanities. Philosophers have for centuries investigated the nature of mind and many today deny the existence of disembodied thought. Instead, they emphatically locate mind and consciousness in brain functions. Psychologists have also investigated mental activities and have recently joined neuroscientists and philosophers to form a new field, cognitive science, concerned with solving this puzzle combining techniques from these different disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach, however, has not yet come close to solving the problem but has drawn upon insights from these various disciplines to propose speculative explanatory theories. And the hypothetical nature of each theory rests upon a basic underlying metaphor. The first part of this paper will present a sampling of these metaphoric theoretical proposals demonstrating the vibrancy of each.In the second part of the paper, I shall propose the application of the mathematics of chaos and fractals to the images of brain processes scanned during cognitive activations as a promising route to the solution of this massive problem of how to demonstrate the emergence of mind and consciousness. Both thinking and awareness are processes that occur in no one location in the brain but rather as a series of clustered neuronal activations best described by nonlinear algorithms of chaos theory with the stable attractor points as fractals.