I. INTRODUCTION: THE QUESTION
A prominent question in the present debate on mind-brain relations is: while comprehension of the mind-related brain functions makes much progress, some investigators, as is well known, arrive at the perplexing conclusion that the mind's subjective experience aspect is epiphenomenal, or trivial, or a constructed illusion, or even that it does not exist, and others have found the mind-brain relationship incomprehensible. This is a problem (although some deny that it is) because it contradicts experience, which is our only source. We do not, for instance, directly experience a neuronal network activity, nor a computer-like function of our brain; but we do have subjective experience, which is not possible according to some theoretical views. Why does this happen and how can it be avoided ?
In view of the difficulties which have over the years been encountered in trying to answer this question, it helps to re-visit some epistemological considerations which can broaden the conceptual basis of the work in this area. Some of these points have not come up in the recent debates on this topic.
II. OUTLINE AND PROPOSITION
One chief aspect of the mind-brain relation question is conceptual (epistemological), rather than experimental, in nature. Actually two questions are involved here and should be distinguished:
(a) how does the mind (of investigators for instance) study nature (for instance the brain) and how does it study the mind? and
(b) how does the brain produce the activities needed for mental activity and how can such functions be modeled ?
If (a) is either neglected or thought to be a part of (b), the mind is usually expected to be an object ('objectively' as in positivism, but also earlier: 'res' cogitans, spiritus, animus). This situation in turn is unavoidable when an assumption is made (commonly only implicitly) that subject and object (or mind and nature) are 'given' as primary, i.e., as from the outset separately established domains or entities. In that case nature is thought of in the sense of mind-independent reality, and commonly as exclusively objective, and the subjective experience aspect of mind is then automatically excluded from this reality.
An 'operational definition' of mind is said to be desirable, but cannot be provided because experience always comprises a central, as well as encompassing, origin and matrix aspect which is limitless, undefinable, and therefore conceptually beyond grasp, 'invisible' or 'black' (an early name for this was 'apeiron'). The latter persists from the origin of thinking before objects, before language, and before the subject-object split, and it is the reason why the mind cannot be reduced to a finite object, or to a circumscribed (closed) mental structure. All mental structures including gestalt perception, subject- object distinction, and verbalisation, crystallise within and remain inside this apeiron matrix.
This leads to the proposition that: the development (or emergence) from the unstructured matrix must be included in studies of the mind-brain relation as a necessary and sufficient condition for dealing with the problem of the vanishing mind: the mind is always at the origin.
This proposition implies the premiss that objectivity is a specialised method within a wider (apeiron) context of experience rather than a primary procedure; it ought to be possible to show this conclusively by means of epistemological reasoning.
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