Bayesianism can coherently express what minds do, if first we accept that such things as minds exist. Bayesianism can’t pin down in an infallible definition what a mind is. In the rough Bayesian view, the mind is a program capable of data processing, manipulation, and storage, running on a constantly active, probability-calculating platform system, deciding second by second which applications to use and which files to open, always aimed at prime objectives of self and species perpetuation. It manifests itself in the material world, specifically in the chemistry of my brain, whenever I physically see, hear, feel, smell, or taste a bunch of sense data and then spot a pattern in them. Sometimes, in events around me, I even see a new pattern and experience what is usually called a causal connection. This brain chemistry change is experienced subjectively as an “Aha! moment.” It is a trait of life, and most especially, of human life. No computer program, so far, has been able to imitate it.

However, Bayesianism does not pretend to say in any more precise detail what a mind is.

The human mind is ultimately its own greatest mystery. Or rather, as nearly as minds can make out, the mind is one of the most successful manifestations of that greater mystery, life itself. It is an entity whose precursors are built into the human genome. Once the basic neurological structure is built, once the baby is born, the brain is stocked with cultural programming authored by the ancestors of that human’s society. The being that results is driven by its very nature to seek a healthy direction, from the molecular level on up to cells, organs, the individual, her family, her society, and her species, to learn and grow. Why? We don’t know. Life’s love of itself is an unanalyzable given.

A miracle, by definition, is an event that seems incorrigibly to defy all rational and empirical explanation. For us today, old-style miracles likely are over. But the most amazing phenomenon that a modern human mind will ever encounter, but never truly know, is itself. You are your own greatest wonder.

                                 

                                                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                              

In furthering our goal of constructing a moral code that is founded on our best understanding of reality, these last three chapters have served only one purpose. They have left us with a model of the mind—and what it does as it thinks and “knows”—called Bayesianism.