“A Masked Beauty”
Three Models of Mind and Consciousness
Mind is the most fundamental yet enigmatic layer of a being. Arthur Schopenhauer, describing Kantian philosophy’s relation to Christianity, may have described the human being’s relation to their own mind: “a man who at a ball has been flirting the whole evening with a masked beauty, in hopes of making a conquest; till at last, throwing off her disguise, she reveals herself — as his wife” (Schopenhauer Basis 105). Intimate yet occulted by proximity, mind and consciousness have seemed largely beyond understanding; some have altogether “ignored the phenomena … [as] inappropriate for empirical investigation” (Salamone n.p.). Far from inappropriate, however, Thomas Nagel suggests that mind and consciousness may be simply incompatible with materialist and neo-Darwinian paradigms. Ultimately, “existence presents us with the fact that somehow the world generates conscious beings … We don’t know how this happens, but it is hard not to believe that there is some explanation” (Nagel Mind 31).
Despite the ticklishness of the subject, there are some points upon which most parties agree. The Journal of Medicine and Life defines consciousness as “the function of the human mind that receives and processes information, crystallizes it and then stores it or rejects it” (Vithoulkas & Muresanu n.p.). Yet this tentative definition amounts to…
