On Quora there was this question: What is the link between mind, brain and consciousness?
Here is my answer, with some additions between [].
You. You are. You are the (missing) link. And “we” are, that is to say, the projection of me and our relationship (= link), implied by the use of language. Every thought is being thought by a human being. And this thought is being thought by U. [Added: at this very moment] Human beings think, using a part of our body called “brain”. Assigning “mind” or “consciousness” to a brain is like assigning “motion” and “movement” to you legs. What is the link between motion, legs and movement? The runner. So the question I read is: “who is running?” or “who is thinking this thought?”. (this, in my opinion, is why we are being moved by e-motion, or should we call it i-motion?).
Bennett and Hacker explain this in more detail in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. They’re calling this the “mereological fallacy”: a whole is not the sum of its part, it is the product of the parts and therefore a different logical type. Some words point to or refer to an element (fact), some to a relationship between elements which we cannot point at (fiction). What is the link between a word and its meaning? You are. You’re making it up (fact and fiction).
The words look the same – words – and (mind you! and and not but) what they refer to creates a paradox. Language is also meta-language (about “saying something about what is being said”) and therefore always implies a speaker. (S)He creates the links, like you’re doing while reading this.
[Eugene T. Gendlin, Ph.D schrijft in: Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: “Indeed, all the functions of implicit intricacy in language and situations are functions of the body.” (cursivering door de auteur)]
