When I referred, above, to (mental) entities that presumably exist "in" other people--entities that you can't "see," why did I use the word "in"?

Let's say that I tell you that I feel sad. There may be nothing about how I look or how I behave that would cause you to believe I was sad, but my telling you that I feel sad would lead, probably, to your coming to believe that I was feeling sadness. And you would have a memory of a feeling of sadness that you had had and assume that "in" my subjective experience that same kind of feeling is present.

But in order for you to have that belief (model), you have to have some mental content, some material out of which your model will be made. In order for you to have a belief about my sadness, you will tend naturally to "locate" it somewhere within your subjective experience, since it obviously does not occupy the totality of your subjective experience. You probably will use for your model something such as an invisible, opaque balloon-like entity that represents the totality of my subjective experience or the container of it, and believe that my sadness is "inside" that invisible, opaque balloon-like entity.

For a child, that balloon-like entity may actually be the surface of my body, which indeed is opaque. The child knows almost nothing about what is inside, and may be quite satisfied to believe that whatever else is in there (including what comes out at times), there is somewhere in there that feeling of sadness, or whatever else I might be describing as my subjective experience. As we grow older and acquire more and more of the Objective Model, and specifically the Physical Model, we become increasingly skeptical that the surface of the body can be the wall of the container for another person's subjective experience, so the location of that opaque container becomes more uncertain, but somewhat disconnected from the person's body. And probably most of us come to visualize our own minds as some kind of balloon that sees out through the eyes, but probably does not have as a boundary some part of the anatomy, such as the back of the head.

Remember that you have to have a way to construct your model, and you can only use your own subjective experience to do it. The memory of containers (or balloon-like objects) is a part of your subjective experience. It seems to be a workable material with which to begin your model. In fact, almost everything seems to be inside of something else. So you create a model that consists of a balloon-like structure that is invisible and opaque, and that contains all of my subjective experience. You have created something you will label as "your subjective experience," or "your mind" (referring to my subjective experience, or "mind"). And it is not a significant jump to then refer to the subjective experience of everyone, or all minds, each one being one of these balloons, and to conclude that that must be true of you also.

We should be aware that different people include different things as a part of the "mind." I believe that almost everyone would include what we have been calling "subjective experience," consisting of primary physical and mental entities. However, many would also include things that are not currently within subjective experience, but could be. They would say, "Somewhere in the back of my mind I know what I am worried about. I just can't bring it fully into my mind." Some have referred to this as the "preconscious" part of the mind, as opposed to the "conscious" part (what we have been calling "subjective experience"). Not only that, but some would say that there is an "unconscious" part of the mind, and that, perhaps with certain specialized techniques (psychoanalysis, hypnosis, etc.), things "in" that part of the mind can be "brought into" the conscious part of the mind. And then some would say that there are things that are in the unconscious part of the mind that can never be brought into the conscious part of the mind, probably because of the neurological structure of the brain. We would say that these entities that cannot be experienced but are believed to exist and are used to explain mental functioning more thoroughly are what we are calling secondary mental entities. And remember that we can talk about whatever you are experiencing that you are calling pain, this being a primary mental entity, but also talk about "pain" as an entity that people feel under certain circumstances, or perhaps "the perception of pain," now referring to a secondary mental entity, sometimes referred to as an "abstract" concept of, e.g., pain.

For the purposes of our discussion, let us assume that by "mind" we mean only subjective experience, or what we would say consists of "consciousness" or "conscious awareness." That way we will be clearer as to what we are talking about and we will be using a meaning that all could agree to, even though some would include more in the concept. I believe that in what we are to consider, these other possible "contents" of the mind will be found not to be relevant to our specific discussion.

So let us directly tackle the concept of the "mind." Let us recognize right away that we are working within, or creating within, or adding to, the Objective Model. We are attempting (linguistically) to model something about "Reality," that is, about things that are "true" or "existent" independently of your or my experiencing them. You might die, and thus no longer have your own subjective experience, but what we are talking about, the "mind," would still exist, assuming there were others still around to have such things ("minds").

So how do we model this presumed entity? We have seen that we have to use materials from our subjective experience. Well, as we have noted, one thing that is a well-recognized subjective experience is that of various kinds of "containers." We see things being inside other things. We see a jar filled with pieces of candy. There is the jar, and there are the pieces of candy inside, so we see a "jar of candy." There is the container, and there are the contents. So I believe that it is easy to see that we are approaching what we mean by "mind" when we see it as the "container" of our subjective experience(s). My perception of this chair is not my mind, but is "in" my mind. I can keep things "in mind," and things can "escape from my mind." We speak of that which remains "out of sight" becoming that which is "out of mind." The "mind" generally is used to refer to the presumed "container" of physical and mental entities, or subjective experience.

But of course an objection can be raised in that the jar is made out of something different than the candy is made out of. So we can say that the mind model perhaps really should be made out of the same thing that its contents are made out of. In other words, the mind would simply be the sum-total of all of the things "in" the mind. In this way, we would use the model of something like a bar of soap. The "bar" is what the soap is "in." There is a boundary between where the soap is and where it isn't. So if we "draw" a "line" (or "wall") around a particular "volume" of space, so to speak, that line or wall will be a boundary inside of which we will find soap and outside of which we will not. That is what the "bar" is. It is everything inside of that boundary. So our basic model of the "mind" may be that of subjective experience, a boundary around it, and something outside of that boundary that is not "mind" (at least not the mind we are considering).

(And soap bar may not be as good an analogy as candy bar, in which the contents of the bar are not homogeneous. There can be more than one kind of thing in the candy bar, just as there are all kinds of subjective experiences within what we are calling "subjective experience," or "mind," but in another sense, all of those entities contained in the "mind" probably should have some common characteristic, and that characteristic is probably what is assumed to be common to all "subjective experience," whatever that might be.)

The key idea is that, if we use the "container" model as a model of the "mind," the most problematic part of the concept is that there is a boundary between what is the mind and what is not the mind. Things can enter the mind and leave the mind. Things can be forced out of the mind or brought into the mind. And the mind is somehow surrounded by what is not mind, or what is not that mind, though perhaps it could be another mind or minds. Yet that boundary, and what is on the other side of it, is almost never made reference to, and especially made reference to in ways that everyone is in agreement about. What is on the other side of that presumed boundary? No definite, agreed-upon answer has been proposed, that I am aware of. The matter is just dropped.

Now we also should be very clear about another thing, already mentioned. No one has ever observed a mind.

First, you cannot actually observe your own consciousness or mind, in that you cannot see its boundary or contrast it with anything else that you can observe.

For example, although you may believe by virtue of your subjective experience that your visual field of one eye is a circular disc, it is actually the shape of a "doughnut" with its hole. If you close your left eye and hold your right hand out at arm's length, wrist bent up so you are looking at the back of your hand, with fingers all extended and stretched apart, and you look (with your right eye) at your thumbnail, then, if your hand is positioned correctly, you will not be able to see your little finger, even though you do not observe any "hole" in your visual field. You don't see the hole, and you don't see the boundary around it, and therefore don't see that particular boundary of your visual field. In the same way, you do not see the outer boundary of your visual field. So even though you see lots of things "in" your "field of vision," you cannot see your "field of vision" itself.

You cannot see that which you cannot see. You cannot hear that which you cannot hear. You cannot feel or smell that which you cannot feel or smell. You cannot observe that which you cannot observe. All you can subjectively observe are the things in the balloon, not the balloon itself. But because we can construct a verbal model, as a part of our Objective Model, that stands for a "container" for our subjective entities, we now tend to make the (unwarranted) assumption that that entity actually exists, right along with houses, atoms, electromagnetic radiation, etc.

Second, no scientist, working with regard to the "physical world" (physicist, chemist, biologist, neurologist, etc.) has ever observed a mind, or even done any modeling of or experiments with such an entity. Scientists have indeed done experiments that have to do with presumed parts of the presumed mind, such as perceptions and emotions, but never upon "the whole mind" itself. You might protest and say that they have done experiments with regard to consciousness, for instance, correlating things going on in the brain with "levels of consciousness," but actually what they deal with is reports of subjective experience or other kinds of observable behavior (such as movement in response to "pain stimuli"), not a "consciousness" itself. In other words, what is actually worked with is a set of primary physical entities, not of primary mental entities.

So you can see that we might be able to say that the "mind" is one of those things that "exist by definition only." And it models nothing. There is nothing that we deal with (that is, that we can do anything to and observe what happens to it) that has no boundaries distinguishing it from that which it is not. Whenever we make reference to the mind, we can expect that we will actually be referring to things that we would say were in that mind. When we talk about levels of consciousness, we are talking primarily about consciousness of things like pain, or light, or sound, that is, of specific kinds of sensory (or emotional, or cognitive) subjective experience, not subjective experience itself as a presumed "entity" in its own right.

And remember our original conclusions regarding subjective experience. Your subjective experience is all you ever deal with. It is all you are (in one sense), as far as you are concerned. And you can observe no one else's subjective experiences, nor can anyone observe yours. We think of (model) subjective experience as a container and its contents, but that model breaks down as we look closely at the way things seem, and are unable to observe a boundary between what is the-mind-we-are-considering and what is not the-mind-we-are-considering. This seems somewhat equivalent to the breakdown of our models of subatomic particles, which can be modeled with nothing that is familiar to us within our subjective experience, other than mathematical equations, which model only kinds of relationships between measurements ("more than," "less than," "equals").

So although our use of the modeling concept of "mind" is highly useful under some circumstances, just as is the modeling concept of "the group" or of "North Carolina," such modeling does not bring into existence a new entity in the physical world. We are just drawing a line (or wall) around something, and in the case of the "mind," our line (or wall) around it cannot be shown to correspond to a boundary (between it and something else) that can ever actually be observed, much less experimented with.

So the "mind" is never observed (within subjective experience), and although it is a model within the Objective Model that is very linguistically convenient within certain contexts, it fails as a modeled entity in providing any specific predictions about anything.

The "mind" is a linguistic convenience to refer to the entire subjective experience of an individual animal (especially human), and perhaps to subjective experience that the animal could have under certain circumstances (e.g., being reminded), and maybe even to subjective experience that would exist if there were the neurological capability (the inaccessible "unconscious mind"). It is simply a linguistic convenience, similar to "my collection" (e.g., of stamps). It is a term to refer to a group of things, primary physical and mental entities at least, that belong to one person and no one else.

There is an analogy between the term "my mind" and "my clothes." Both terms are referring to a specific set of entities, but no one can point to the mental entities, whereas everyone can point to "my clothes." The use of such linguistic labeling is such as to be able to restrict the "mental entities" that we are talking about to "my mental entities," just as we can restrict the "clothes" that we are talking about to "my clothes." We are bringing into existence a new entity, namely, a collection of things. The things were already existing, but linguistically we constructed a new entity that exists by definition only. Nothing new is brought into the world by doing this. I could even tell a person that, as of this moment in time, I am giving him all of my clothes. Now they are not "my clothes" but "his clothes." Nothing new would enter the world, but the re-definition might be very desirable to myself and the other person, permitting us to live up to each others' expectations regarding "ownership."

Thus, within the Objective Model, the "mind" itself cannot actually be found in any of the equations describing relationships among things in the world of "Reality," the reality that is being modeled especially by the scientific methods, whether within the Physical Model or within the Mental Model.

We can now ask a rather important question. Why do we have this model, called "mind," if indeed we can't experience it, we can't do anything with it or to it, and it exists by definition only?

I would say that the "idea" or "model" of the "mind" arises to a great extent from certain subjective experience within the Subjective Model, and therefore from that indistinct connection between the Subjective Model and the Objective Model. We have already considered the fact that most of us do indeed have a rather distinct feeling associated with ("primary") entities within subjective experience having to do with whether those entities are part of the "self" or not. Most of us tend to divide up our subjective experience into entities that are either "self," "others," or "inanimate objects." (We probably include, as "others," animals and even perhaps occasionally plants, as when we believe they respond to our talking to them.)

The "self," as we have said, probably is based upon a rather marked feeling of "familiarity," a sense of confidence in predictability. I "know" (can predict confidently) that my hand will move in this direction (that I "intend" to move it in).

"Others" are those entities that seem to move around a lot and can suddenly cause the self to have to do something and therefore tend to cause a certain amount of "tension," or preparedness to respond. These would be referred to as "other people," and perhaps even "other animals."

"Inanimate objects" are things that tend to be still or move only in very limited, predictable ways, or in highly unpredictable ways that we have learned to live with (such as breezes) and don't require us to respond to novel situations very much other than ways that are fairly routine and expectable. And when an inanimate object causes us substantial worry, we tend to start thinking of it as an "other," even perhaps with a personality, sometimes a malignant personality, and occasionally even give it a name that we would give a person (as we do with hurricanes).

As we look at "others," we usually see fairly clear lines of demarcation between what the "other" is and what the "other" is not. We see a "boundary" between the "other" and the space surrounding the "other." So it is easy to regard (model) the "other" as a "container" of everything inside, a container the surface of which is opaque, as we have noted above when discussing early modeling of subjective experience by the child. (All of this modeling could be considered to exist somewhere in that indistinct boundary between subjective experience and the beliefs about that subjective experience, referred to as the "Subjective Model," as we are using the terms in this presentation.) And somewhere in the indistinct boundary between the Subjective Model and the Objective Model is the belief that inside that container are thoughts, feelings, perceptions, "awareness," etc., similar to one's own, even though invisible. So the "other's" body, that opaque container, is seen probably to have within it somewhere subjective experience like one's own.

The reason this is somewhere close to or within the Objective Model is because it is to a great extent taught by others, using words as well as non-verbal communication. ("Well wouldn't that make you angry? Well that's the way I feel! So stop it!!")

On the other hand, this "theory of mind" phenomenon (belief that the other has thoughts, feelings, etc., also, and not necessarily the same as one's own) is considered by some to probably be present to some extent in at least a few other species (that don't have much symbolic communication), so it could then qualify as part of the Subjective Model (unless one posited that some other species have a rudimentary Objective Model, such that they can teach each other about what it is like to be the other).

(But let us also note that all of this subjective experience and subjective and objective modeling is, according to the Physical Model, presumably going on within the brain of the self, in response to input from the environment.)