Sender: Jorge Martins de Oliveira, MD, PhD <jmartins@rio.nutecnet.com.br>
Subject: What is Mind ?

Rudimentary living beings , like the unicellular ones, which are deprived of a neural structure, have printed, somewhere in their genetic code, a kind of survival memory, carrying a minimal of information about their ecological niches and the ways to get fed and to reproduce. And that is all! The idea that very small beings, such as bacteria, could have a collective mind or a collective soul ( perhaps that is the idea behind the idea ), reminds us of some Eastern spiritualistic speculations which admits that, since they do not have an individual soul, they joint to gain a communal one. And, as they advance, through reincarnation, towards Man, an individual soul is acquired.

For the sake of curiosity, let us mention the Italian spiritualist, Pietro Ubaldi, who proposes, exactly, the opposite : separated souls, as spiritual evolution goes, tend to congregate, according to specific affinities, forming collective souls which will, eventually, merge with the Cosmos as a whole. Patricia Churchland uses to say that small species are capable of doing things that we, humans, will never do. For instance, no man can build a dam like a bee does. However, this does not mean that the bee is conscious of such a prowess. It can not, because the bee has no brain, only neural ganglia. And, no brain, no mind. No mind, no consciousness ! As an observation, I would like to invite Dr. Simonini to read Churchland's article : The neural basis of consciousness. He can get it from Internet. The site is : http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dlane/patchuch.html.

I also advise the book : Poeira Vital de Christian De Duve. Ed. Brasileira. Campus Ed., Rio de janeiro, 1997. Back to the subject : Mind, as recognized by modern Neuroscience, is the sum of all activities of the brain. This implies the existence of a system of highly specialized connections that only neurons, with their dendrites and axons can provide. Therefore, by its very definition, mind can only exist if there is a functioning brain to make it so. We have nothing against the concept of autopoiesis, when it refers to life as a dynamic process, a system capable of self regeneration and self reproduction. But not when its mentors say that : "In all levels of life, starting with a single cell... mind and matter are connected."

Actually, that would be true if that matter had a brain. But the existence of a brain in a single cell is anatomically impossible. So... Anyway, what has been proposed is not, in general terms, new. According to the antropologist Rodrigo Jokisch, Maturana and Varela "rediscovered" the metaphor of self-reference, an old topic in German Classic Philosophy (Kant, Schelling, Hegel), applied it to biology and called it *Autopoiesis*. (Ref : http://server.snni.com:80/~palmer/dialognet.html)

One last commentary : I don't think that Dr. Cardoso intended to imply that there is, in the brain, an area that correlates with religious experiences. What she probably meant to say is that, epileptic focus in the temporal lobe, can give rise, when activated, to several kind of hallucinations, including those associated with feelings of intense beatitude and mystic ecstasies. To conclude : I congratulate Dr. Simonini for his interest in such an arid topic and also for his sharp and intelligent remarks. However, I feel that he should regard the autopoiesis theory for what it really is. Never as an attempt to bring back the Cartesian Theater of Descartes' dualism. Once again : There is no mind without a brain. And perhaps, at least for us, humans, when the mind goes, so goes the life. Using Churchland words : " We feel we are more than neurons discharging. At least, that is what (we think) we are, while the neurons are discharging."

Prof. Jorge Martins de Oliveira, MD, PhD, Full Professor
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil