Episode 2903
Mind
Wed, 2025-Apr-16 01:10 UTC
Length - 3:24
Direct Link
Welcome to Featured Wiki of the Day, your daily dose of knowledge from Wikipedia’s finest articles.
The featured article for Wednesday, 16 April 2025 is Mind.
The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances, and unconscious processes, which can influence an individual without intention or awareness. The mind plays a central role in most aspects of human life but its exact nature is disputed. Some characterizations focus on internal aspects, saying that the mind transforms information and is not directly accessible to outside observers. Others stress its relation to outward conduct, understanding mental phenomena as dispositions to engage in observable behavior.
The mind–body problem is the challenge of explaining the relation between matter and mind. Traditionally, mind and matter were often thought of as distinct substances that could exist independently from one another. The dominant philosophical position since the 20th century has been physicalism, which says that everything is material, meaning that minds are certain aspects or features of some material objects. The evolutionary history of the mind is tied to the development of nervous systems, which led to the formation of brains. As brains became more complex, the number and capacity of mental functions increased with particular brain areas dedicated to specific mental functions. Individual human minds also develop as they learn from experience and pass through psychological stages in the process of aging. Some people are affected by mental disorders, in which certain mental capacities do not function as they should.
It is widely accepted that non-human animals have some form of mind, but it is controversial to which animals this applies. The topic of artificial minds poses similar challenges and theorists discuss the possibility and consequences of creating them using computers.
The main fields of inquiry studying the mind include psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. They tend to focus on different aspects of the mind and employ different methods of investigation, ranging from empirical observation and neuroimaging to conceptual analysis and thought experiments. The mind is relevant to many other fields, including epistemology, anthropology, religion, and education.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:10 UTC on Wednesday, 16 April 2025.
For the full current version of the article, see Mind on Wikipedia.
This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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Until next time, I'm neural Brian.
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