Guest Author - Tara Sullivan

This dialogue is the product of tossing the ideas of Plato, Edmund Husserl and the Stoics around in my head.

Persons of the Dialogue
Empiricist
Stoic

Part II

E: Can you elaborate on what a field, in your terminology, happens to be?

S: Certainly, a field is an area of causality that is discrete from all other such areas. For instance the physical field has physical antecedents for all of its effects. The mental field has ideal antecedents for its effects and the third contains both physical and ideal antecedents. Thus each field is discrete from the others.

E: This seems to be true, yet how does this prove that the mind is in another field of existence?

S: In this way. The mind comes to a new understanding without a physical change preceding it. The distinction comes from a careful observation of the reality in which we live. The mental field consists, in nature, of concepts that interject order upon the physical field from the perspective of the understanding of each individual person. Ergo it is the concepts that create each person’s understanding that determine the way in which a person in turn views the physical field.

E: You go too far too fast! How do we know for sure that the antecedent of understanding is in this so called mental field?

S: From what I know of PET scans and other research on the brain, the researchers first ask a person to think of something. Then they can see the area of the brain that is associated with memory, emotive response, abstract thought or whatever it is that they happen to be researching. This methodology implies that there is an antecedent stimuli to each respondent brain activity. Now if we look to the antecedent of each of these responses, for example the antecedent of the firing of the visual cortex, we can know from which field that particular response originates. Thus we can say that the firing of the visual cortex originates in the physical field because its antecedent is a photon being projected upon the retina. Yet in other instances we can demonstrate the mental field at work. The firing of the areas of the brain associated with memory originate in the mental field because its antecedent is the mental desire to recall a certain memory.

E: So where does the existence of these three discrete fields leave us in regard to our original question?

S: It has become obvious that the term “nature of the mind” is very broad. When we discuss this what do we actually mean. Are we to look to psychology to explain this for us or are we speaking of a deeper and more meaningful mind?
E: Your statement of the changing truths of sciences based on fact seems apt. For we will get a different answer from each school of psychology. The Jungian will give us a mainly mental field explanation while the Behaviorists will give one that comes solely from the physical field.

S: Perhaps we should look further back. Psychology is literally the study of the soul. What is the soul? Of course we must separate the theological overtones of this word and bring its ancient elements back to our definition of the mind. This is the idea of an animation principle. In other words the modern word mind contains the meaning of being an element of control, the point of all our control in fact, this is the same as what the ancients knew as soul.

E: So you are saying that the definition of mind is that which makes a person a discrete individual, that by which they make and apply decisions.

S: Yes, I would say that this is part of the definition of the mind.

E: What would you say was the other part, or are there many?

S: There could be many, but to begin with I’ll postulate that at least one other part exists. This is the part of the mind which interacts with and formulates those concepts with existence in the mental field alone. In other words the area of the purely Ideal.

E: So the part of the mind that allows our control of ourselves and our surroundings must obviously deal with the physical field.
S: And the second part obviously deals solely with the mental field. That leaves us with the question of how the two fields interact.

E: Perhaps,my friend, we should leave that for another time!