Philosophy of Mind and Neuronal Configurations

I’ve been reading more about the Philosophy of Mind. Although its odd that I cannot discuss it here. I am getting from it now that like a computer, the processing of language or symbols, etc., cannot be observed in the brain, but through brain chemistry and our neural network of connected neurons (or like the memory in a computer and its processor), we can process language and symbols. What was interesting was to read before that about how some think that the mind is not in the brain simply because, if you observe, for example, someone’s face, or a coffee cup, you cannot observe in the brain the face or the coffee cup. Unfortunately I keep reading little bits at a time and haven’t been reading very steady and so a lot of the terminology kind of left my mind, brain, whatever.

What I tend to think is that if you could find a way to somehow examine the neurons and their configuration after you’ve learned something, like a new word, that you could almost interpret the word learned as a pattern somewhere in that gray mass. I don’t mean that you’d see some neurons, like drunken idiots at a football game each display a letter painted on their bare chests spelling out the name of their team, but rather if you could understand how the neurons made the connections to retain the memories you might be able to see within the configuration a pattern that indicates the actual memory. Yes, this is probably ridiculous, but if you look at artificial neural networks, you could probably within a trained network, especially if you understand how it represents the patterns that it can match, discern what kinds of patterns it is recognizing, such as the letter A, or faces, or whatever.