Abstract
What is mind? We are each certain we have one of our own and most of us would claim to know what we mean when we speak of it. Yet when we try to go beyond the first assertion that our minds exist we find ourselves presented with, to use one of Winston Churchill's phrases, a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery. The riddle of mind has been a challenge and a debate for scholars for some twenty-four centuries. The question of mind has long challenged the concerted wisdom of theologians, philosophers, and scientists alike. Mind has been called by some "the battered offspring of the union of philosophy and psychology" and, like an abused child, the topic of mind is one psychology and neuroscience have alternately embraced, then denied, beaten, and locked away, and then embraced again. Many have equated this most quintessential character of what it is to be a human being with spirit or soul; others have dismissed it as a nothing-more-than-a-reflection or image of brain activity. No one really denies the existence of at least his or her own mind, but arguments over the nature of its substantial existence have been endless. Almost every psychology textbook mentions it briefly in the opening pages and then refuses to speak of it again.
The topic of this book is the phenomenon of mind. It presents what is probably best provisionally called, at this point in the book, the functional model of mind and does so in the holistic context of the complete individual human being. This context is conveyed by what is called the Organized Being model. The famous mind-body division has objective validity only as a logical division, never as either a real division into independent Cartesian substances or as a pseudo-division into one phenomenon (body) and one epiphenomenon (mind). Roughly, the theory can be said to explain "what mind does" within the overall and indivisible whole that is the individual person. This is why I do not speak of the mind but only of mind. In the final analysis, this book is about the Nature of being human. As the theory presented here will show, to be a human being is to be, all in one, a transcendental idealist, an empirical realist, and a practical pragmatist. How each of us balances this synthesis in ourselves produces, and is called, one's individuality.