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Philosophers were obsessed with zombies long before the recent movie craze. A philosophical zombie is a creature that acts like a regular person in every way, but has no mind. As a thought experiment, this idea of zombies is meant to explore questions about consciousness; whether it adds anything to one's understanding of human behavior to assume that people know what they're doing.
But if you think about the mind as a biological function, the premise is too absurd to be enlightening, an "if pigs could fly" or "if wishes were horses" kind of absurdity.
Your mind is a virtual machine: an information machine. Every waking moment your brain gathers disconnected points of data about the world and about the state of your body, and then instigates your muscles to react, and notes the results. Your mind derives meaning about the state of the world and your body each time it notes the quality of change in the data coming in. That meaning, essentially, is information. You can call that process of transforming raw data into meaningful information "mind".
Some people might quibble with this definition of information. After all, a computer can collect raw data over time and perform calculations to compare time A to time B. We don't say that a computer has a mind, but surely you would call these calculations a form of information. Absolutely. But the information content of these calculations still depends on a mind to derive meaning from them. Without a mind there is no program to tell the computer which data to gather and which operations to perform.
Some people say that mind is an emergent property of the brain-in other words, it is an entity that cannot be completely explained using the language of neurobiology. I disagree with this; not because I think mind can be reduced to neurobiology, but because mind is not a property; it is a function. It is what the brain does. The emergent property of the world, as transformed in the brain, by the mental functions, is information.
Why all this talk of emergent properties? One of the primary reasons we are still muddled about the function of the brain is precisely because we neglect to use our words precisely. If you open a book about "consciousness" you will probably find that the author uses it in a dozen different senses. And in science, our ability to understand a phenomenon is entirely dependent on the language (verbal and quantitative) we can find to describe it.
What are emergent properties, and why are they important? Take biology as an example. Biological phenomena, like the functions of a cell, are emergent properties of chemical phenomena. In other words, you could, conceivably, think of everything that goes on in the cell of a living organism as merely a chemical reaction. But you would get nowhere trying to understand the activities of a cell using only chemical concepts, because the number and variety of the chemical reactions, and their orchestration in time and space, is far too complex-you might have to grasp thousands, perhaps millions of simultaneous and interlocking chemical reactions if you wanted to explain the mechanisms of metabolism or photosynthesis or cellular division.
Since that is way too hard, anyone who wants to explain the mechanisms of life must know chemical principles but overlook the details of chemical reactions and instead deal directly with biological processes that involve countless chemical reactions. Thus is biology an emergent property of chemistry: every biological phenomenon is constituted by chemical reactions, but we can't understand biology using chemical concepts. Similarly, every bit of information is constructed from qualities of the world and body, but it is only by knowing it-by processing it in the mental functions of the brain-that it acquires the meaning inherent in the concept of information.
And so trying to understand the mind by focusing primarily on its parts, like a neuroscientist, or only on its output, like a psychologist, is to miss an opportunity to grasp the aspects of mind that are most relevant to understanding its disorders. If you want to understand mental illness, you have to understand how the mind makes information from the raw data of the world and body, using the apparatus of the brain. And so many of the subsequent discussions in this series will aim to do just that.
