zoran,
Another, much less complex hole in understanding the relationship of the mind to the brain is the issue of time.
As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience our reality as flashes of perception, cognition, then ordering and judgement, as a function of navigation. Then we have learned to narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge.
This creates a couple of basic biases, one of which is our view of time.
We view time narratively, as the point of the present flowing past to future. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.
Yet the evident fact is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential>actual>residual.
Duration is this present state, as events coalesce and dissolve.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Patterns steer the process. Energy and form.
Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequencing of thought.
The left linear, cause and effect sequential hemisphere of the brain is analogous to a clock/ruler, while the right, emotional, intuitive side is to a thermostat/barometer.
Our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems process the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the forms precipitating out and referees the emotions and impulses bubbling up. Hence the association of the heart and gut, with emotion and instinct.
So the process churns along, from prior to succeeding events, these patterns rise and fall, like so many waves.
Consciousness goes past to future thoughts and feelings, while the perceptions come and go, future to past.
As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
With only this fluctuating rhythm of the present to mediate.
Which is not to say this explains consciousness, but it would seem a useful point to consider, when trying to delineate it.
